Let me start with a confession: I've fallen off the wagon...hard. A combination of work, personal health, and the holidays have conspired to keep me from working out in any significant way. Yesterday Katie and I made a commitment that will get me back on track. More on that later.
I want to spend most of this post praising my better half. No, not my left side, but my wife, Katie. After the City of Oaks run in November Katie decided to run her first 5K on Thanksgiving morning. The first few runs we went on together went OK but they usually ended in me trying my best to be a good coach and failing miserably. There are some things a husband just shouldn't do and I have found one of them. So Katie trained on her own and with her personal trainer and I helped by coming up with a training program she could follow leading up to the Gobbler Run in Wake Forest Thanksgiving Day.
If you live in North Carolina or anywhere along the Eastern seaboard you know how cold this fall has been. As I type this, ice and snow blanket the roads and the local schools are closed. We are five or six days away from the official start of winter but the frozen waterfall outside the Y says it's here. Thanksgiving morning was no warmer and if there's anything that Katie hates more than running with me its being cold. Seeing friends, pre-race nerves and a bevy of dogs helped to keep our minds off the freezing temperatures.
After the lackluster white dove release and the delayed start time (there were close to 2,000 people at the race!) we jogged across the starting line and up the first hill. I won't go into too much detail about the race but I have to say that a super-optimistic person wrote the course description:
The course is mostly flat, looping through the historic residential and business districts.
While the latter half is true I would not describe the route as "mostly flat." Despite the difference in expectations Katie ran well and at a faster pace than anticipated. She finished with a very respectable time and I was and am very proud of her.
I think the most important part though is that she wasn't content with her time and she saw room for improvement. Which leads me to the new commitment that we've made and why I'll soon be back on the pavement.
Katie and I are committed to running the Raleigh Rocks Half Marathon on April 10, 2011. We will be running in memory of Katie's grandmother, Jan Dolfi, who we lost to cancer in August of this year. We'll be raising money for cancer research as we train so look for information about that in the coming weeks and months.
It feels good to be working towards something again and it feels even better knowing a beautiful woman will be running beside me this time.
Merry Christmas everyone.
Ryan
No comments:
Post a Comment