« 2008-07-01 | HomePage | 2008-07-27 »
07/06/2008
5K Baby!!
It's been a month since I started jogging, and today, I actually ran 5K continuously, i.e., with no walking breaks. It took 39 minutes, which is geriatrically slow, but that's 39 minutes of continuous running! Actually that in itself is another first. I don't think I've ever run for 39 minutes straight before in my entire life. I actually felt surprisingly good for most of it. I had a giant stitch in my side for the last 10 minutes or so of that, but I'm quite proud of myself for pushing through it and making it to the 5k mark.
I can hardly believe it, actually! I can now lay to rest the notion I developed as an 11-year-old that 3K was the max I could do, and that it takes half an hour and a lot of pain to go that distance. And to think that a month ago, it was all I could do to run a whole minute before I would need to stop and take a 2-minute walking break.
So 2 birds with one stone today. My first 5k, and my longest-ever continuous run, at 39 minutes. Yay!!!
I thought it was going to take two months to get to this point, but it only took one. This PR should also be quite easy to beat with a bit more practice. (Can you believe that the really good runners can do a 5K twice as fast?) Anyway, now it's time to set a new goal. I think a far-off goal would be to complete the Torshavn Marathon in 2009 (don't ask why Torshavn, of all places, bit of a long story), but I'm pretty sure I need an in-between goal, so I'll have to think about that for a bit. Off the top of my head, I would like to run a sub-30 minute 5K, and I would also like to start thinking about a 10K somehow, but I'm not sure about the timeframe.
In the meantime, I'm going to spend the day being proud of myself for getting my sedentary, allergic-to-running self this far, and for proving to myself that I can overcome limits I put on myself if I just get myself into a new "I can do it" frame of mind.
Woohoo! Time to take on the world!
19:15 Posted in Sports | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this