After a month of procrastinating, and almost entirely as a result of starting this blog, I put on some shorts and trainers and ventured outside to complete the first run of the Couch to 5k Running Plan.

So before anything else, I must apologise to anyone from Brighton & Hove who had the misfortune to see me out and running last night. My legs do not often see the light of day. As it happened, however, the light of day yesterday at around 9 to 9:30pm was more of a wet, very windy darkness. Perfect time to start - few witnesses.

I am something of a geek. I like coding. I like building websites. I like tshirts with coding and website jokes on. I get most of xkcd. I have a map of the internet. I wasn’t always this way, however. Back when I was younger I played a lot of sport. Fives and squash, every day. I was fit and healthy.

And then I left school and discovered beer and the art of sitting in front of a computer and working. My active lifestyle quickly gave way to hours in darkened rooms, nights on the tiles and a diet of … well, mostly bacon, pie and pizza, if I recall correctly. Not overly healthy. Surprisingly enough, I gained weight.

Soon, I shall post a photo here - a “before”, if you will, to be joined at some point by an “after”.

I gained the weight slowly. Very slowly. So slowly as to be virtually undetectable. I didn’t weigh myself, and rarely exercised, so didn’t really notice my fitness packing its bags and leaving. And then one day, not too long ago now, I realised that I was unhealthy. I had even picked up a smoking habit along the way somewhere.

In October last year, I stopped smoking. Phew. No more inhaling poison many times a day in the vain hope of satisfying an addiction that I grew to despise. Incidentally, if you are a smoker and say you enjoy it, I say “bollocks”. You’re full of crap and you know it. And the sooner you admit to yourself that you hate it, and that it’s killing you, the sooner you’ll be rid of the damn things and the easier you’ll find stopping.

Back to the subject at hand … after a few months of being smoke free, I decided to take the next step towards improving my health and start doing some exercise. It started with a few games of squash - 3 a week to be precise. While a step up from my previous exercise regime - which was primarily based on Red Alert and World of Warcraft - it’s not had the desired effect. I’m enjoying playing, and will continue to do so.

I decided to see if I could bring myself to do some running again. I ran for a few weeks in 2006, and that was fine, until knee pain forced me to stop for a couple of weeks and, well, that was that. One thing I had seriously missed in 2006 was a plan of some sort, and aims or goals. It’s all well and good saying “I’m going to run three times a week for half an hour”, but without a specific plan for how you’re going to run and what you want to achieve, you’re - sorry, I’m - just not likely to keep it up very long.

Which seems like a good time to outline my goals. I have several. Short term, I am to run 5k within the next two months and start a routine of doing so three times a week. Longer term, I am to run a half-marathon, and maybe cycle the London to Brighton bike ride next year. I am currently 220lbs (same as 2 Paris Hiltons. No, not the hotel, you sarcastic bastard), and I’m aiming for 196lbs to begin with (and we’ll see where I go from there). That’s all for now.

I’d like to do all of this doing things I enjoy, or can at least sustain. In a perfect world I could achieve all of this while eating waffles drenched in maple syrup and watching Blackadder. This is no perfect world, however. So the current plan involves eating better (and not eating late, which is a serious issue at the moment - my wife works late some evenings so we eat very late), playing squash and running, all of which I believe is sustainable.

Which pretty much brings us up to when I stumbled upon the Couch to 5K plan. It’s also about the same time I decided to start a blog dedicated to health and fitness for geeks.

The Couch to 5K plan is designed to help someone like me - lazy and unfit - to a level where they can run 5k (about 3 miles in real money) three times a week, in the space of about 2 months. 3 runs a week, of increasing “difficulty” (for want of a better word).

The first, which I have the pleasure of repeating twice this week, is a relatively simple one. Five minutes brisk walk to warm up, followed by a run for 60 seconds, then walking for 90 seconds. You repeat this 60 seconds on, 90 seconds off routine for 20 minutes. And that’s it! “Even I can do that”, thought I.

And this morning I managed to finish the first run - a fact I am actually quite proud of, despite it being of a level that should be considered very very easy. It was harder than I anticipated - I had thought that the squash would have had more of an impact. Or perhaps it did, and I was just starting from a worse position than I originally thought.

My initial thoughts are that 2 more runs will be fine this week. So far, so good. It’s a relatively small jump to next week’s runs as well, which is very encouraging - same warmup, but 90 seconds on, 120 seconds off, for 20 minutes.

I’m interested in tracking my progress, so for the next couple of weeks will be trying out some tracking programs and sites. If you have any suggestions or recommendations, please let me know.