View high resolution
After this morning’s run.
-Brianne
Julia is in New Mexico attending her boyfriend’s graduation, so today we both ran by ourselves. Instead of the bike path we run together, I chose to head out to the a pond closer to my house and run around the trail there. It’s a mile all the way around and scenic. I lost count in the middle of my run, so there’s a possibility I did one extra repetition.
Friday was only the second day of running and I already learned a valuable lesson. It’s probably not a good idea to stay up until two in the morning the night before you plan to get up at six to go jogging. When I got to Julia’s house at 6:50 on Friday morning, I was in no mood to go jogging. But after twenty-or-so minutes of outfit changes, putting on contacts, and generally procrastinating, we headed out. There were way more people on the path today than Wednesday, but the new route we tried had a great view of the river at one point.
Repetition Six was still the hardest for me, but we made it through. We gave ourselves a little bit of extra time during out 90 seconds of walking, but I still finished my 8 60-second jogs so I’m counting it.
-Brianne
Wednesday (5/9) was the first day of training for Julia and me. We had originally planned to start on Tuesday morning, but when I woke up at 6 am to get ready, it was raining and I don’t think either of us was really at that level of commitment yet. Instead, we postponed our run until Wednesday. I met Julia at her house during her lunch hour and we hit the local bike path.
We took an extra long warmup walk and then jumped right into our eight repetitions of 60 seconds running, 90 seconds walking. The sixth set was particularly hard for me, but I managed to make it through all eight sets by some miracle.
I think a lot of my previous attempts at running have failed because I pushed myself too hard right at the beginning. So far, having a partner has helped me slow myself down so that I can actually make it through the entire jog. I just want to be able to run. I don’t particularly care how quickly.
-Brianne
I have been talking about running a 5K for roughly as long as I have known what a 5K was. Of course, almost all of that time was spent talking about running a 5K, rather than training. Every few months, I would get inspired to try actually running. I would get out my sneakers and hit the streets only to return home soon after, discouraged and out of breath.
Now that I’m graduating from college in less than a week, I will undoubtedly have a lot of free time to fill. I plan to spend that free time taking running seriously. And this time I have a partner!
I met Julia in early September at a roller derby bout. Eight months later, we were both training with our local derby league and I had somehow convinced her that training for a 5K with me was a totally worthwhile plan. Follow us as we document our progress following Couch to 5K.
-Brianne
