Couch to 5K

This weekend while I was at Faith's Baby Shower, several interesting topics came up.

The first made me chuckle but also start thinking about my own life. Amy was talking about "30 things she wanted to do before she turned 30." Now here's the part that made me chuckle. She said she just had things she wanted to do before she got old. Those were not her exact words, but that was the gist of them. When she said that I looked at Faith and kind of rolled my eyes. Faith chuckled too and told me "she doesn't mean you are old." I know she didn't mean anything. She was referring to herself and the things she wanted to accomplish in her own life.

But it made me start thinking about my own life. Several of our mutual friends have been doing a similar list "101 things to do in 1001 days." For me, that was way more than I wanted to commit to even though there are no 'size' requirements on the 101 list of items. It could be as small as making your bed every day for a month or knitting 1 project out of every book you own, or reading Pride and Prejudice. Or as large as running a Marathon. But the whole reference to "things I want to do before....." caught my attention. I've been thinking for awhile about certain things that I want to do or experience with my life.

Another conversation that caught my eye was Susan telling us about this program that she just started. It's called Couch to 5K. The idea is to transform yourself from couch potato to runner. After 2 months you should be ready to run a 5K (3 miles). You start of the first week alternating running for 60 seconds with walking for 90 seconds. You do this for 20 minutes 3 times. The second week you run a little longer, and so on until you are up to your 8th week and running 3 miles. Now depending on your degree of potatoness, you may choose to repeat a week or two. After thinking about it, I decided I wanted to do it too.

I've looked up 5K's in our area, hoping for something around the end of September, beginning to middle of October. At first, all I could find were 2 on September 18th and the next one wasn't until Oct 31. But I have since found one in Elkhart on October 9th. Gonna email the girls and see what they think of this one. I say girls, because Kelly said she would run also. Not run with us, since she could leave us in the dirt, but be there to cheer us on. Which I think would be great. Kelly has been very encouraging. She just started running a year ago and has already run several triathlons and a 1/2 marathon. So you see what I mean by leaving us in the dirt.

Anyway, to make a long story short. I finished by first workout last night. Now that I am an Memorial employee, I get a major discount towards a membership at Memorials Health and Lifestyles Center. They have an excellent gym and pool. I was a little stiff this morning, but not nearly as bad as I thought. I did realize that as I was writing up the description I did unintentionally cut my exercise program short. I did the 5 minute warmup walk, then began my running. I was supposed to run for 20 minutes, but I only did 15 because I was looking at the treadmill clock and saw the 20 minutes and thought yeah I did it! Susan told me about an App for my phone that I could use or I found some Podcasts that play music plus tell you when to run/walk. Have to get those set up on my phone.

I called my parents last night to tell them what I was doing. I should have known what my Dad's reaction would be. His immediate reply was "YOU CAN'T DO THAT." Nothing gets my back up more than him telling me I can't do something. For those of you who don't know it, I was in a car accident 22 yrs ago that messed up my left ankle pretty badly. It has no radial movement and limited up/down movement. However I have noticed that when I exercise my ankle, it actually loosens up and works better. I told him that I know my limitations. If my ankle starts to be a problem, then I will walk the whole damn 5K if I have to. While the running I did last night did make my ankle ache a bit, I wore my ankle brace to bed and it was fine this morning.