march experimonth 2010 - train and compete
The majority of this post has been sitting in draft form since April 4th:
So a brief recap. In march, my experimonth was pretty good. I was sick the first and third weeks of the month, so i didn’t do much training, but I did sign up for The Great Human Race - a 5K that I helped organize for the first time in Durham back when I worked at the Volunteer Center (pretty sure it was in ‘96). I ran with a team from the Museum, where I work now, raising money for the care of our new yearling bear cub Yona.
My typical exercise routine over the last 3 years is a weekly 45-minute stroll around the Museum on “ranger duty” - a weekly chance to get away from my desk, look for snakes in the wetlands, and have a radio handy in case of any visitor emergencies. A few times during the last couple of years I’ve tried to start running and tried to start regular pushup routines, but neither have stuck yet (i’ve managed to keep it up for at most a couple of months). My hope was to start slow and build my way up to where I could sustain my high school “jogging pace” of an 8 minute mile. But that was not to be.
The first week I was sick, so I postponed the start of exercizing. The next week I started to try jogging, but was mostly doing long (3-6 mile) walks with some brief spurts of jogging. The 2nd-4th weeks I was pretty regularly running twice a week with some people from work and doing 1.5-2.5 miles at a time.
By race day, my goals were:
1 - finish without stopping
2 - beat Courtney (a co-worker also running in the race)
3 - finish in under 30 min
I accomplished the first two, with an overall time of 31:20. At the end of the race, this mom and her 7-9 year old daughter were behind me and said “we’re going to beat that guy.” I really didn’t think I could run as fast as I did down that home stretch. I passed them both, but that little girl beat me even though she had to take 3 strides for every one of mine. We both beat her mom by at least 15 seconds.
Tweets from the month included:
I just registered for Great Human Race 2010: http://bit.ly/aZsCJs via @activenetwork This will be my March #experimonth: train and compete!
Got an early start on March #experimonth (train & compete) with 90 min walk to DBAP and back, via Amer Tobacco Trail #GHR2010
One thing my high school cross country training in Baton Rouge never covered: what to wear when it’s 34 degrees outside.#experimonth
Post mortem: Looking back, this was a major success. I kept running on and off until the summer, when it got too hot and I eventually switched to swimming. Lately I’ve been walking a lot, but missing some good regular exercise and thinking swimming may be the way to go. But this colder fall weather is really making running attractive again. It really helps to have people to exercise with, too.
