First 5K!

This last weekend, I completed my first 5K! It was called the Hope Pie Run, and you brought a pie and $5 to enter. I made a simple apple pie.

I got there early and, despite recognizing a high school classmate’s parents, I didn’t know anybody there. Daniel was at work and my parents were watching Wesley, so I just milled about and tried to kill some time before the race.

I had skipped my Friday Couch to 5K run in favor of using the race as my workout, primarily because the workout was “jog 20 minutes” and there was no way I was going to do that two days in a row. Heh.

That idea worked out nicely – I skipped the five minute warm-up walk and started the race jogging, and I made it all the way to the halfway point before taking a walking break! This was a personal best for me – previously, the longest I’d ever run was for 17 minutes and then I had an asthma attack. This was 25 minutes of running, or a mile and a half! And my lungs felt great.

I walked almost the entire second half with a couple of jogs here and there. I run incredibly slowly; it’s the only way I can do any kind of distance running at all. In the end, my time was almost equally split between the first and second halves.

Some of the people who had finished the race already came out to cheer on the rest of us, which was really nice. I finished the race running and ended up with a time of 49.26, which is around a 16 minute mile.

After you finished the race, you got to go inside and sample slices of delicious pie! I chose chocolate (good until I noticed coconut shreds in it – not what I was expecting!), sugar cream (never heard of it – it was plain but yummy), blueberry (best!) and someone else’s apple pie (good).

After my pie, I left and almost forgot to check my final time on the board! I was in my car getting ready to back out of my parking spot, and I realized I couldn’t tell anybody what my time was if I didn’t know. I had to shut the car off and run inside to check!

Also – when I was eating pie, a tiny lady in a cute matching Nike outfit sat across from me and started a conversation about the race. She mentioned she wasn’t a runner and had simply walked the whole way (which surprised me), and then said, “not like you though! You ran almost the whole way, didn’t you?”

I did correct her since I only ran the first half, but I still appreciated that somebody noticed my hard work! (Even if I am the slowest runner to ever run. People walking occasionally passed me, if that gives you any idea.)

I felt pretty good the next day – the outsides of my hips were kind of sore but that’s basically it. I’d totally do another 5K to see if I can improve my time a little, or maybe run for longer than halfway. I realize that my time is dismal for anybody who considers themselves a runner, but because I do not consider myself a runner, I am pretty happy with it.

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