Last week I ran the first official 5K of the season and was pretty pleased with my time – 28:14, about 75 seconds faster than my time last year. It doesn’t hurt that the weather was a solid 25 degrees warmer this time than it was last time, but I’m glad that I was able to make such a substantial improvement in my time.
A few days ago one of my friends had posted a 10K that she had signed up for, and I figured “why not?” and decided to sign up for it as well. So now I’m running a 10K this weekend.
The thing that hit me this morning (I say this with all possible humility) is that 10K at this point is nothing to me. I was running 6 miles a few weeks ago and surviving just fine; the only constraint in my decision to run the race on Saturday wasn’t whether I could finish, it was whether I had anything else going on. It’s an awesome feeling thinking that deciding to get up and run 6 miles on a Saturday morning is almost trivial now.
The biggest takeaway from all of this, I suppose, is that when you’re out there doing your 6 and 7 and 8 mile runs through suburbs and boring flat terrain, it all pays off eventually. The weather has finally gotten warmer. It’s actually so warm out this last week that the tulips are blooming 5 weeks ahead of schedule. The 80 degree days won’t last much longer, but they’ll be back, and knowing that I’ve got the option to do a 10K here and there without having to really train for it will hopefully keep me motivated on the weekends when the last thing I want to do is get up and run for an hour and a half or more.
So to those of you who are like me a year ago and starting to build that mileage up: keep it up. You’ll consider 6.2 miles trivial before long, and the feeling will be pretty awesome.
Leave a Reply