C25K

So today was the first day of a journey I'm feeling very anxious about.  My brother challenged me to participate in the Down Syndrome of Louisville 5k run the first weekend in October.  I've walked a couple of 5k's and I've always talked about getting in shape to run one.  My dream 5k is the color run, I can't think of a more enjoyable way to run then getting tons of color thrown at you!  

However if you know me you know I'm probably the most out of shape person in the whole world... no really it's true!  I have tried and failed at starting to train for a 5K, so I'm hoping that by blogging about it, I'll have a bit more incentive to stick to my training schedule.  

What is my training schedule you might ask? Well I found a great free app called C25K that is supposedly supposed to help you go from being a couch potato to running a 5k in just 8 weeks, I feel like that is fairly ambitious, but I'm going to give it my best effort.  

Today I started my first training session, it was 30 min long, and basically if you aren't familiar with the C25K programs you start with a 5 min warm up, and then you run for a minute and walk for a minute and a half and rotate that back and forth and end it with a 5 minute cool down.  I am proud to report that I was able to stick with the whole training schedule, I didn't walk when I was supposed to run. This may not sound like much but for me that is HUGE!! I'm already feeling it though, my joints hurt, my calfs are super tight, and tomorrow should be interesting to see if I can do all the running parts!  I feel like this is going to take me a lot longer than 8 weeks to be ready to run a 5k with out walking... however by the 5K in October I will be able to at least run part of it and it will be a big accomplishment for me! 

One thing I have to say about running, it does help you forget all the stress, and how much you hate your job.  Maybe this running thing will help me be happier :).  

Also another big journey I'll be starting is after talking about it for years I'm actually gonna get serious about applying for a masters program. I've settled on trying to get into a MPA program, so I signed up for  a GRE prep course that starts in September, hopefully I didn't just waste my money :).z