Sunday, April 21, 2013

The Starting Line

I am a 27 year old mother to 4. I am an RN. Those are just a few ways to describe yours truly.
This isn’t the beginning of my story, but I have to start somewhere!
A breif history: (Okay it turned out not so brief, so sue me!)
Ran track through middle & high school. Beat the 200 meter school record my junior year of high school. I always did short distance, never long. I thought the cross country runners were crazy!
My dad has run for fitness for a long time. About 7 years ago he started getting back into training for distance races: mostly half marathons, a few marathons, and the occasional 5k.
About 5 years ago my brother started doing the same.
Now, me? I would start running and then two weeks later get bored or busy and not run again for a few months. I would run 2 miles and felt like I would die. It always felt amazing afterwards though.
I am now into it for the long run (no pun intended).  Running is so great for anxiety, depression, laziness, frumpiness, I-ate-too-much-last-night-edness, and even grumpiness.  My best pal asked me to run the Color Me Rad 5k with her in August (with a group of our other friends), and so we decided to take this seriously! (While not being too serious, obviously) We have now signed up for two other races, the first one being June 15th.  
I began running a loop around my street in my neighborhood, and discovered the Nike running app on my phone which told me I was only going about 1 mile.  When you first start running, a mile is going to seem like freakishly forever.  And you're going to hate it.  FYI.  So I jolted up my distance to about 2 miles.  I am still pretty out of breath at the end of those two miles.  
So here are my current goals:
1. Be able to run 4 miles by June 15th (the date of the first 5k)
2.  Run at least 3 times a week, NO MATTER WHAT!!!