A beginners struggle

I started running, relatively seriously, about a year ago. At first I was only able to do a half-walk half-run sort of thing. I did this for about six weeks slowly increasing the ratio of run to walk until I was able to run for a half of an hour. The first time that I did it I felt awesome, the way I imagine it feels to be at the top of Mt. Everest, exhausted, in pain, relieved and ecstatic all together. I kept running for a couple of months just concerning myself with being able to be out there for a half an hour at a time.

As will happen with anything, this feeling slowly faded and pretty soon I was dreading my run and trying to find any excuse I could come up with not to do it. It is amazing how important cleaning the cat box can become when you are stalling.

I talked for months about signing up for a 5K so that I would have a goal to work towards. But I never got around to it. I got to the website. I got the registration form information all filled in, but I could not bring myself to actually push the "register" button. Luckily I have a wife who knows me well enough to know when I am too scared, so for my birthday last year, she signed me up for a 5K and told me that I had six weeks to prepare. I was terrified. I had never even worried about mileage. I was a half-hour runner, nothing more. I needed to get myself into the mindset of working on miles and I needed to do it quickly.

I figured out that I was running about 2 miles in the half-hour, sometimes more and sometimes less. But the average was about two. I knew that I needed to increase my mileage, but I had no idea how. One would think that to run farther, you simply run farther but after I had hurt my toe, which is surprisingly debilitating, I didn't want to take any chances. I went to my old stand-by "Runner's World" website and found a way for me to increase my mileage safely. I started working on this new program and started to notice a pretty big difference in the amount of miles that I was able to run, as well as the speed that I was able to do them in.

I made it to the day of my first 5K. It was a local, "Run to feed the Hungry" race and I was all nerves and excitement. The gun went off and I started running. There were a lot of learning points that I will tell about in another post, but I finished in a respectable 29 minutes and was very pleased with myself. and very happy with my new shirt! The camaraderie of the race and the feeling of accomplishment was awesome. I loved being around people who were all of the same mindset, if only for an hour. And I started looking for my next race, I was hooked!