Friday, October 30, 2009

The Starting Line

I've finally taken the plunge and decided to start a blog.  I hope it will serve as a way to keep myself motivated, to keep track of my progress, and maybe even help and/or motivate others out there.  So, I'll start with a little bit on how I got into this business of running (not sure if I can even consider it "running" yet as I'm still pretty slow).

Running was never something I would have imagined myself getting into.  I always thought of running as boring and I would rather do almost anything else other than run.  Every time I would go to the gym, the treadmill would be the last piece of equipment I would ever use (although I still feel the same now because I don't like the treadmill much).

So, earlier this year, on the day of the 2009 Surf City Marathon, I noticed that I had a lot of friends on Facebook that had run in this race.  I thought that was pretty cool and kind of got me curious about possibly doing some kind of race also.  My wife and I spoke and decided we would set a goal to train for an upcoming 10K.  As we looked around for upcoming races, the one we set our sites on was the Seal Beach 10K  on April 4, 2009.  So we printed out a training plan from the Hal Higdon site and started on our journey.  About one week after, my wife found out she was pregnant with our 3rd child so she stopped her training but I continued on.

I ended up not really following the training plan that closely just because of work schedule and other scheduling conflicts with kid's activities and such that would come up.   I didn't really make the training a priority so it was getting brushed under the rug anytime something else came up.   Since I'm a beginner, I gave myself an easy and very attainable goal for the 10K which was to just finish it!  I could do that...

The day of the Seal Beach 10K came and my pregnant wife and 2 kids came with me that morning.  My wife ended up walking the 5K and pushing my 2 other kids in a stroller (talk about super woman!).   To make a long story short, I was able to complete the 10K in a time of 1:07:48.  It was such a great feeling to finish and that was the longest I had run up to that point so I was really proud for making it to the finish.

I ran another PCRF Reaching for the Cure 10K in Irvine the following month and improved a little bit on my time at 1:06:25.  My last race was the Disneyland Half Marathon on Sept. 6, 2009 which was really memorable not only because it was my first half marathon which I had a ton of fun running, but it was also the same day my 3rd daughter was born.  I think she waited to make sure I was able to run the race before deciding to come out :)

I'll write more later about the individual races at a later time.

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