What a great 5K

Saturday I ran a 5K. And it was truly one of the most rewarding 5K's for me.

About 3 months ago ago I was chatting to my friend C from church about running and preparing for my half marathon. We got chatting about training and running. She had all her doubts about her running any race and inquiring why do people run. But I could sense that she wanted to do a race and I knew this 5K that was coming up. So I encouraged her to check out the coolrunnings.com website and have a look at the couch to 5K plan. She seemed encouraged to try it out, but had her doubts about sticking to the plan and going through with it all. I encouraged her to go and get some good running shoes from an awesome running store in the area and that I would help encourage her along and check in with her to see how she was doing. I explained the couch to 5K plan was only a 6 week plan, 3 days a week and at that time she had almost 10 weeks to be prepared. She got excited about it and went to the running store the next day.

She then convinced her 3 other housemates to train with her for the race (although two backed out for various reasons) and we had all four of them training together for the 5K. Through our discussions with other people at church we managed to convince 2 other friends to train for the race and then we had another 2 just join us on race day...(although, those two were already more runner-y/have trained for stuff types.) Our race day turn-out of friends was 7 of us racing and some other friends showing up to be our cheering section. It was great!

During her training things happened, she got really sick at one point and stopped her training a little...but stuck to a good deal of the training. A week before the race we were chatting and she said that she was uncertain if she would be able to run the whole race as she was only up 20 minutes at a time at that point. I told her she would be great and that I thought she could really run the whole thing if she wanted to and how race day was just different in so many ways. With lots of people it's just different than going out and running just to run. She seemed uncertain, but I knew she could run the whole thing.

Encouraging people in your life to try something new like a 5K or challenge themselves with things that they think they can't do, but you can see that they definitely can achieve it is so rewarding. It was fun to encourage her through her training and it was even more fun to run the 5K with her and one of her housemates J and encourage them along as they journeyed toward their first 5K. The three of us finished together in 33:49. It was a really awesome day.

I may have even convinced her to keep running and go for a 10K in January. :-) It is so much fun to share he things in your own life that you love with the people in your life. It was an AWESOME 5K.