I did it ~ sort of . . .

Well, the 5K is over, and I'm trying to reframe this as a successful learning experience, if not an outright Success.  I didn't make my goal of running the whole way without stopping to walk, but I learned a lot.

Lesson 1: know your route.  Had I known the topography in advance I would've paced myself much better and possibly not had to stop and walk.  The route was pretty much straight up hill for the first 2.5K and mostly downhill on the way back.

Lesson 2:  Go sloooowwww . . . like, WAY slower than you think you should be. I thought I had learned this one during training, that the only way to go the distance is to pace really slowly, but in practice I guess my default pace is always starting out way too fast and burning out.  I had to stop once to walk about 1 Km into it, and again briefly at 2K and 2.5K (top of hill for a water break).  Still, I ran almost the entire way back down, and my final time was under 37 minutes.  That's about 2 minutes better than my personal best, and 4 minutes ahead of my goal time.  Which tells me I was going way too fast.

Lesson 3:  Meta-lesson.  I don't "learn" nearly as fast as I think I do, because I'll think I've learned something when I understand it intellectually, but it doesn't do me any good till I've learned it experientially.  Until I knew what it felt like to apply lessons 1 & 2, above, I couldn't really apply them in the crunch.

But anyhow, I did it!!!! I finished the 5K in less than 37 minutes, and it was a glorious Family Event (both Nelson family and church family) for a good cause.  Yaaayyy team!   : )

Here's something you don't see every day

I'm training for a 5K.  Big whoop, you say, but this is me.  

Running.  

Voluntarily.

Really.

So, now that you've picked yourself off the floor, be reassured that I will approach even this most  seemingly physical of endeavors with as ruminative and navel-gazing a perspective as ever.  Already I'm convinced of at least 3 great "life lessons" learned from my 2 weeks (so far) of haphazard training.  But the most wonderful part is that I haven't quit yet.  And it hasn't been nearly as impossible as I would've thought.  Or at least, the really hard parts are completely different/opposite from what I thought they would be.  But more on that in later posts.

Already I'm up to running 2.5 miles without stopping to walk.  Yes.  For me that's the best cardio-vascular performance I've ever had in my life, except perhaps in the fog of some netherworld dance-clubbing days.  And those certainly weren't exactly healthy days . . . 

But off I go to bed now, since this "training" things works a whole lot better if I get something resembling sleep at least 5 nights a week.