My First 5K

    
                                                                          …and all the fun therein.

         At the beginning of October I participated in my first 5K. Had you told me a year ago I would willingly put myself through such torture I would have thought you were entirely insane. I have never been much of a walker (let alone a runner) but I am coming to realize I enjoy the exercise. Suddenly, I felt a need to challenge myself.  I was looking into different ideas such as a thirty day yoga challenge or some other kind of workout challenge. This search lasted days but nothing I came across ever felt totally right. Then the registration for The Great Pumpkin Run came across my newsfeed I knew this was the challenge.

Like most daring souls, I had to bring a friend along with me who wasn’t sure she wanted to come. The time has come to introduce the first Fellow Striver, Alexa! She is a mother of two, dabbles in photography, and is an avid reader. I call her my challenge buddy because when I see a crazy challenge I want to do she is always up for trying it with me. She admits she wasn’t sure we could do the 5K and wouldn’t have thought to do it on her own.

 

 Isn’t she beautiful?!

            After we signed up it suddenly occurred to me I had no idea how to go about this. What was I supposed to do? I knew with my average level of exercise (which is slowly increasing) that just appearing at a 5K and saying, “hey, babes, where’s the start line?” was not the way to go. So obviously some training was, indeed, in order. Being myself, I naturally took to Pinterest for advice.

            I found so many blogs, charts, and videos about how to train for your first 5K and many of them were rather discouraging for me. They were all so intent on the idea of running the race and I was not entirely sure I was ready for that. One video I watched (which I would rather not reference because, like I said it was not very helpful to me) even said that the only successful  5K is one that is run the whole way. I was shocked!

            This idea still blows my mind. The man with this opinion is an avid runner and has completed more than one marathon so to him, a 5K truly was nothing. I still felt the video he was making was for couch to 5K people not marathon to 5K people. I wanted to scrap the whole idea and search for a refund.

            I hope anyone else who may be in the couch stage and wants to go to 5K does not run across this type of discouragement. It took me some time to come back to my original plan. The plan was to finish the race. Whether I ran or not was up to me. My goal (and Alexa’s) was to finish the 5K. Furthermore, we would do it in less than an hour. That being said, it was time to devise a schedule.

Believe me when I say there was a training schedule. I signed up nine weeks before the race and I planned on using every day of those nine weeks to bring my body up to speed. It was very similar to other Couch to 5K programs but I am too much of a control freak to do it their way. I broke the nine weeks down into three segments of three weeks. I figured that if a 5K is 3.1 miles I could work myself up to three miles three weeks at a time. My very first draft of my schedule looked like this.

 

          First, I would be walking or jogging on my treadmill three days a week—Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday would be “cross training” days while Saturday was rest day. Tuesday and Thursday were also known to me as wild card days because I could choose any activity I wanted to keep me from boredom. Sunday was reserved for a weekly aerial yoga class so I could begin my week with some deep stretching. I also planned to do a very small yoga session every morning to awaken my body. This routine was different every day, depending on what my body needed.

           Within those weeks of slowly trekking longer distances, I was also planning to casually increase my speed and introduce running into my program. For example, I would be training myself for one mile for the first three weeks. In week one, I planning to walk five minutes then jog one minute for the entire mile. With week two I would step that system up to walking four minutes and jogging one for the entire mile. Week three would see me walking three minutes and jogging one for the mile.

           Once I stepped up to two miles in the next segment, my plan was to continue this gradual running increase. For the fourth week of training I would then be walking two minutes and jogging one. However, I knew my body enough to know this may not work out for me. I have never been a runner and I certainly did not want to intimidate myself out of this or injure myself. Therefore, I allowed in my plan that if I struggled walking two minutes and running one for an entire two miles, I could go back to walking five and running one for the first week at two miles. I would then move to walking four and then three minutes the next weeks.  

There was also a great deal of fun preparation to keep me motivated. For example, my 5K buddy and I planned to stay the night before in a hotel so we would have access to a pool and a hot tub. Walking a 5K mid-autumn can be cool enough to create extra work for your muscles so the hot tub was planned as a serious necessity. The pool the night before was for fun as well as a way to get very deep stretches. I am rather fond of doing modified yoga poses in the shallow end because the water holds my body and all my muscles have to do is stretch.

I bought a 5K bumper magnet and kept it on my fridge to keep me motivated to eat healthier. I also had a deep desire to put the magnet on my car so I could not give up. The back of my bedroom door became a shrine to motivational pictures because it was one of the first things I saw every day. I very much enjoyed the search that lead to this mural. I read so many inspiring messages and stories that it nearly erased the doubt I had encountered previously.

Alexa and I had custom matching shirts created for race day. We came together and thought of all our shared fandoms and came up with this little gem.

Speaking of gems, I purchased clear quartz crystal pendants and made necklaces for us to wear. Quartz is a known power stone so when I felt like I couldn’t go on I held the stone and visualized red hot energy flowing through my body to propel me onward.

Tuesday was the day when Alexa and I came together to work out in the evening. This was one of the most motivational aspects of my training because it was the guaranteed day of the week I would actually follow the plan. It was a perk that Alexa and I are both a little competitive and wanted to outdo the other. However, we have been friends since elementary school so these days were also filled with love and encouragement. As much as we wanted the other person to “eat our dust” we also didn’t want the other person to fall behind. It was a fabulous mix.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say, and after the first three or so weeks this plan fell apart. Alexa and I did get together every week but neither of us were so diligent when we were alone. Workouts turned into overtime for her and Netflix and Chill for me (side note, I work at an elementary school so I kept getting sick during this time). Salads turned into Chinese takeout when I was too tired to cook. We did not let any of this stop us when race day came. We had signed up for this race, had shirts made, and booked a hotel. We were going. We were walking. We were finishing. No exceptions.

What should have stopped us was my serious cold. I could not breathe through my nose. My head pounded if I was out of bed for more than two hours, let alone walking three miles. But after paying for the entry to the race and for the hotel, there was no turning back! I carried a pack of tissues with me in my hoodie pocket and made sure to take medicine before going. Being a fan of essential oils, I knew that eucalyptus on my throat and the soles of my feet would help my lungs and a drop of peppermint rubbed into the temples would keep me from having a headache. Illness was another reason the hot tub was a fabulous idea on my part.

I forgot what hotel we were staying in. I knew which exit I needed to get off the highway and I knew the hotel was just off the road. Well, like many exits, there were several hotels off of the road.

“It begins with an H!” I insisted. “I think it was a Hampton.”

Alexa pulled out her phone and began Snapchatting about the endeavor. We drove around for a while and I finally decided to pull over and look up hotels in the area to remember which one I had chosen. It was the Holiday. See, I wasn’t too far off.

The night before the race I could not sleep. It was a combination of being sick, being in a different bed from my own, and the large Starbucks coffee I had on the drive to the hotel. Alexa, of course, slept quite well despite my wandering around the room desperately begging sleep to come. In the end I only slept about three hours.

Driving from the hotel to the race was quite a beautiful hassle. The road leading to the farm the race was held on was bumper to bumper traffic moving at a steady three miles an hour. We turned off of the main road following Alexa’s GPS through hill, dale, and cornfield trying to find another way to get to the farm. It took us fifteen minutes to wander around the back roads until we came back to the main road one block further than we had been when we veered off. The early morning sun drenching the dried corn and the deep green grass was magical. Everything carried a golden hue and we felt like we were gliding along in Nirvana. I would have taken it over a block of packed cars any day.

It was somewhere between an eighth and a quarter of a mile walk to the start line from our parking space. The race being on a tree farm, we waded through tiny evergreen trees to the giant red barn. Beyond the structure we saw the start line and we finally filled with a combination of hope and dread. We went to the huge sign-in tent to pick out our number and our sweatshirts. Aren’t they cute?!

I regret that I did not have the training that I wanted to have. Even if I had, I would still have had trouble because the ground was so incredibly uneven. Part of the way was gravel, which was not too much trouble. The empty corn field, on the other hand, was a mine field of dry, tough stalks and hard packed soil. The grass turned out to be just as treacherous, full of rocks thrown out of the fields earlier in the year during planting. This is where I fell. Only my pride was injured, luckily.

Poor Alexa needed to pull me along most of the race, largely because of my cold. She also has long legs earning her the nickname, “Lexi Long Legs,” when I was falling behind. My favorite picture of our dynamic (taken by a professional hired by the race) is this one. 

When we walked together before the race we kept pace with each other fairly well. There were times her long legs became a problem for me but in truth it was a pace for me to strive for. If you will recall, on race day I was still not over a cold and only had three hours of sleep. These are not ideal conditions for exercise and had I not had so much invested in the race, I would have backed out.

Also, we certainly have happier pictures from the race. Such as these two photos of us looking much braver than we feel. Actually, once we got going both of us felt fairly well. 

 

I love this photo where we stopped to have a photo taken in our race shirts! Not that we did much running, poor hobbits.

When we came to the point in the race where we could see the finish line, Alexa decided to leave my sick, sorry ass and run the rest of the way. The last bit of the race was through a corn maze so I could never see more than a couple feet ahead of me. I was thankful to have these pictures to see her victory. Our goal was to finish the race in under an hour. That being said Alexa flew across the finish line with 58:34. 

I would like to take a moment to point out that the average time for a runner in a 5k is around a half hour. In fact when I looked up the race times there was a guy who ran it in less than twenty minutes, making the rest of us look bad (actually, go him!) For your first 5K the goal is to finish, not winning. From that point on your goal is to slowly get better and better times. I think it is really easy to forget that you are doing this for yourself, not anyone else.

 

 

And here is me crossing the finish line. I nearly cried; I really did. Everyone who participated got a medal which I think is fabulous. Once I came through the maze and finished the race my true exhaustion hit me. My muscles ached so much I could hardly stand any longer (and let’s remember it was a long walk to the car.)

In fact, from my fall I was having trouble with my right thigh and could barely lift the leg to walk. If you have never done a 5K and you were reading this for inspiration please note that extreme pain was because of an injury, not the race itself.

Still, everything considered, I finished the race with 59.37!

 

         After, we rushed back to the hotel to soak in the hot tub. This literally took away all of my pain for several hours. Driving home was no problem whereas driving later that day was nearly impossible because of the thigh pain. I could barely move my leg between the gas and brake pedals and I needed to lift my leg with my hands to get in and out of the car.

          Once I was home, I made sure to take in plenty of protein. I am a vegetarian most of the time and when I am not I normally eat chicken. On this day, I ate baby back ribs. I drank tons of water and rest was the primary objective. I mixed eucalyptus with coconut oil and rubbed that into my skin, using extra eucalyptus for my thigh. This essential oil is known for helping muscle pain. One reason it is helpful is because it is a “hot oil”, or it creates a burning sensation on the skin. The feeling is very similar to pain creams you can find in stores but this is homemade and all natural.

I slept nearly the entire next day and my cold held on for another week while my body rested up. Despite my personal troubles this race was one of the greatest things I have ever done. My confidence in myself increased a hundredfold. It is currently my goal to walk three miles every day now I know it can be done. I am still at a mile a day right now but I have all winter to spend personal time with my treadmill.

I can’t wait for our next 5K in the Spring!