1.5 km running 500 meters walking.... my new cardio strategy

I had heard about interval training i think it is called when referring to running, but I never tried it. I also didn't mean to do it this time but in the past 10 days or so I have been messing about trying to figure out if walking and running the same distance burn the same amount of calories and came to the conclusion that they in fact, do. But while that was all going on I also figured out something else: I find it much easier to complete longer distances if I stop to rest frequently. Duh! right?

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I have considered my "research" into whether or not 1km of running burns the same amount as 1km of walking and no longer feel the need to look into it anymore. As far as me personally is concerned, I have established that this is the case. But I didnt want to test it anymore not just because I feel I had all the evidence that I needed, but also because during those 1km walking portions, I was getting really bored. It takes almost twice as long to walk a km as to jog it, and I am in good enough shape that I don't actually need to do this. It was just research but while I was walking the 1km portions I was constantly looking down at my watch and thinking "sheesh, 600 meters to go still?"

So after collecting all the data that I cared to I went out for a few days in a row and did some runs where instead of walking a full km and only running one km at at time, I would do around 1.5 running and then 500 meters of walking. Honestly, at the start of it I found even 500 meters to be too long and would start running again early.

This is not the correct full readout because something happened yesterday that has never happened before. My watch stopped responding and then restarted itself. Upon full restart it had lost all the work I had done up to that point which had been somewhere between 4 and 5 km of mixed running and walking. Annoying! I hope this doesn't become a recurring theme.

It should be pretty easy to determine which parts are the running parts and which parts I was walking :) . But one thing I want you to take special notice of is that my heart rate never enters the VO2 Max zone, which is the one that I consider quite dangerous given my age.

Also, I ended up almost purely by accident, running single km's much faster than I normally would be capable of doing.

I am about a 7 and half minute per km runner if I am doing 5-10 k's without stopping or walking. Sure, I could do 6.5 minute kilometers but it is very taxing on me to do so and I will likely end up quite sore because of it if I attempt to maintain such a speed over the course of 5km or more.

It also becomes something I loathe doing and this is one thing I always try to avoid when I am doing exercise. However, when I was doing planned breaks in my runs, I found that I was quite easily capable of doing a full minute per km faster than I normally would do and I was doing this without being actively aware of it. IE: I wasn't TRYING to run fast, I just was doing so.

So for me this seems like it could be quite beneficial for a couple of reasons: One, I don't hate doing it, I actually kind of look forward to it and two, it gets my confidence up to make me aware of the fact that I don't actually need to push myself in order to make this happen.

now, this doesn't mean that I can regularly maintain that speed for a long period of time but it does indicate to me that I am getting stronger because previously even maintaining that speed for 1km would be quite difficult for me to do and I would be hurting afterwards. When I do it like this, I don't feel any nasty during or after-effects and well, I am delighted about this.

So if you are like me out there and you are trying to lose a bit of weight but also don't want to be lazy about it, perhaps this could also be the way to go. Run for a certain amount of time and then plan on walking until you are ready to go again. For me, I allow myself a maximum of 500 meters when I take breaks, but then, when I start running again I have to endure the remainder of that 1km as well as the following one. It's turned into a big of a game for me and I don't hate it... and for me that is the whole idea.