WEEK TWO by Cassie

This is the second week of training for the 5K.  Jill trained on Monday with a friend while I was at work, and on Tuesday, I trained by myself at the gym on the treadmill.  Today, Jill and I ran together at the lakefront. We plan on training together every Wednesday, since I'm off in the mornings that day.

Today we ran at the lakefront. (The lakefront has a major road running parallel to it, which almost the entire town uses on a daily basis.  This meant there is a huge percentage of the population of our small town that may see my jiggly butt and even jigglier front training for this race.)   For some reason, I felt a lot of pressure to dress cute for our run.  If it's gonna jiggle, it may as well do it in style, right?  I ended up changing running clothes several times until I came up with the right, semi-passible outfit.  I settled on a t-shirt that said NIKE in big, Old-English style letters.  I bought it a year or so ago, at another point when I decided to get fit but of course needed a "workout wardrobe" before I could start working out (good excuse to shop).   So when Jill came to pick me up, she looked at my shirt and said, "Nike?  Oh you must be a real runner now."  I felt dumb.  "It's like three years old, ok?" I responded, hoping that would make me sound like I wasn't trying too hard.

When we arrived at the lakefront, we did our 5 minute walking warmup, then began our pattern of alternating running for 60 seconds and walking for 90 seconds for 20 minutes.  Surprisingly, it was a lot easier.  We talked through almost the entire run, whereas we had run in heavy breathing-filled silence the week before.  I also felt less compelled to stare at the stopwatch, counting down the seconds 'til the running interval was over.  We tried to pace our run better, so that it was slower and zapped less of our energy at the beginning - I read in the training material that the focus of our training should be less about speed and more about endurance.

We made it through the run and felt really great about the accomplishment by the end.  We ended up back at my house to stretch and cool down, and Jill enjoyed some holiday peanut M&Ms (see photo) while I dreamed about how cool it would be for us to cross the finish line in coordinated cute running outfits.  Pink maybe?  No, black.  It's slimming.  (Good excuse to shop).