A New Venture

I am trying something new that I've wanted to do ever since Wesley was born. I am going to run a 5K! Back in the 9th or 10th grade I started running and actually got pretty good. I wanted to try out for cross country in high school, but I was too afraid that I wouldn't be able to keep up with the other better runners on the team, so I never even gave it a chance. That was then, back before I'd pushed a 7lb 3oz baby out of you know where with 6 people watching. Wesley's birth and being a mother sparked something in me that says "You know what? I don't really care as much about what other people think of me anymore!" I'm willing to take risks because I have this great husband and child to support me. I also heard my sister (who has run a 10K) and my cousin (who has run a marathon!) talking about running and it really excited me, so I decided to go for it.

So, on April 26th, I'm going to run in the 5K Health Run here in town. I went online to www.coolrunning.com and found a training program called "From Couch Potato to 5K". Its a 9 week user-friendly program to get you running 3 miles in 30 minutes and I have really enjoyed it. I'm on week 5 and this week I'll be running 2 miles without any walking! I'm pumped about this and looking forward to the race. There are some great resources for runners out there. Another cool website I found was www.mapmyrun.com which lets you plot on a map the routes that you walk/run and will tell you the distance and elevation. You can also keep a training log on your workouts. Membership to mapmyrun.com is free, you just sign up with a username and password. You can check for races in your state and city by going to www.runningintheusa.com and selecting your state. They list races going on in different cities each month and give you links to the websites of the races. I've set my sights on April 26th and who knows what will happen after that. But, come April 27th, I'll be able to say I've run a 5K!