Saturday, January 22, 2011

First 5K (in Several Years) Complete!

What an exhilarating morning! Mel, Danielle, Margie, Brandon, and I ran the Greenville News 5K this morning. It was so much fun to stick together as a group and cheer each other on. This is the first race I have done in years and the excitement was in full force. I am running 5 miles (run/walk - that's our distance training method) on other days, so this wasn't too hard, but boy was it cold! A balmy 27!

Here we are about a 1/2 hour before the race and getting psyched up as we saw about 1,500 other runners/walkers join our ranks.


Mel made signs for Danielle and Margie to wear on their backs! Congrats to them for doing such an awesome job today!



At the start, Mel set the 1/1 pace time on her watch and we were off! Margie just started running last Saturday and she is already racing. I was so impressed. I love, love, love using my All Sports app on my phone to track our mileage along the way. It uses the GPS on my phone to track our route, time, and distance in real time. I love that type of feed back. I would like to find another 5K before the 10K on March 5th and really push it to see what sort of time I can make. This run was for fun and to do it as a group and wasn't too intimidating. I definitely can tell since I have been trying to work out 6 days a week in some form or fashion that my endurance is much better than 1 month ago, but I've still got a lot of training to do. I was so excited to get back into the pool too! I've had three good swims, 2 this week. I was so happy to swim 1800 yards on Tuesday (1 mile), then when I went to the pool on Thursday (STILL a bit sore from Danielle and Mel's killer "The Bruce" workout the night before at the Y) I was quite slow going. After about 500 yards in, I looked on the wall to see a "try me out" swim team workout printed on the dry erase board by the pool side. 3250 yards! The distance seemed mind boggling at first, but then I realized I used to do that daily for swim team in high school. Goes to show me that I had my mind pretty closed at going beyond 1800 yards. This changed my thinking and I swam 2000 yards in all. I'd like to tackle that workout as a cross training exercise, or at least work up to it in the next few weeks.

It was so exciting to cross the finish line and see the excitement on everyone's faces. There's just something about completing a race vs completing the same distance on non race days. Here we are after crossing the threshold!


I have to congratulate my team mate Mel for being such a leader and team motivator! Thanks to her, we have ourselves a wonderful little team and are quite determined! Running with a group is so motivating! Mel's lovely husband Brandon is always out there and sticking with us! My hats are off to Danielle and Margie, who are now officially racers! :-) I had so much fun. The best part was seeing Stephen and Thad (Danielle's husband) at the finish line. That means so much that they were there. It's exciting to have someone at the finish line to give you a smile and a hug.

After the race...
We've gotten into a nice little routine of going to a local coffee shop for a post run coffee warm up before we head our separate ways. Thumbs up to Coffee to a Tea!

On the way home...
So my mom has always liked to walk and jog. As we chatted on the phone about the race and some of my past runs, we got talking about the CRIM 10 Mile Run that takes place in Flint, MI every August. I told her I was planning to come home to run it again. My mom was excited and said she was going to sign up for the CRIM training run and we are going to run it together! Cheers to my mom!!

The next challenge on the schedule is the March 5th 10K Reedy River Run! I need this sort of motivational goal to keep my butt in training. :-)


7:36pm
The Results are in...although not doing this for time, I still want a record!

1703 420 Brandon Edwards 00:51:35 16:38 35 M Greenville, SC
1704 456 Raina Farrell 00:51:35 16:38 32 F Simpsonville, SC
1705 422 Mel Edwards 00:51:36 16:39 42 F Greenville, SC
1706 680 Marjorie Hintalla 00:51:37 16:39 33 F Greer, SC
1707 1227 Danielle Roland 00:51:37 16:39 35 F Greenville, SC

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