Running

Good God, I have run, simply to run.  It’s not a day I ever thought would happen, even now that I am fit.  Two years ago the only running I would have done was for the last chicken ball at the Chinese buffet, and if I knew there was another tray on the way I wouldn’t even have bothered then.

A friend of mine is doing something called the Warrior Dash today.  I only found out about this on Thursday and immediately thought it would be a wicked thing to do.  Basically it’s a 5km run with various obstacles along the way like climbing a hay bail mountain, getting over a big wall, leaping over fire and whatnot.  I looked for the sign up right away but registration for the only Ontario date has long since closed.

My immediate thought was I would love to do that, and hmmm yeah I bet I could.  And then I thought about what it takes to do well, so I looked at the results from one of the past events and the top people are finishing the course in around 20 minutes give or take a few, the top guys my age are generally around 27-32 minutes to complete the circuit.  Seeing stats of course got me thinking.  If I did this could I do well?

I have not done any direct training for running at all, because I generally don’t like running.  However my last two assessments at the gym have involved the beep test and then running an obstacle course that Jodi designed.  And during a couple of my workout days I run sprints on the treadmill.

Today I woke up early, which sucks, but I put the time to use.  As I lay in bed trying to go back to sleep at 6am I was thinking about could I even run 5km?  If I tried how long would it take me?  So I got out of bed, did my Wii fit measurement looked up what a 2.5km course would be got dressed took a sip of Gatorade G2 and went outside and then… Ran.

My goal at the outset was to run the 2.5km and see what the time was, as I approached the end I said to myself, I could run this again, so I hit the lap timer on my watches stopwatch and did the course again (plus a little just in case Google maps rounds up.

Today I ran 5.2km in 23:46.68 and the split time at 2.5km was 11:19.01.

Not too shabby for my first time out running I would say.