Flirty by Thirty--5K Diva Dash

Left to right-- Jenny, Carly--First time 5Kers

Kelly--experience runner

Me--First time 5Ker in very obviously soaked sweatpants

Jackie Lee (not pictured missed the race due to a cold)-Returning back to running after doing a marathon a few years ago

All great cheerleaders who kept me going the past 10 weeks!

I completed my first 5K. I'm saying first because I really want to do another one minus the snow conditions! I wish I could say I ran the full thing; however, I will be honest and admit that I walked 30 seconds after my 35 minute playlist ended. I couldn't even see the finish line and was so frustrated. But I turned Beyonce back on and started running again to end with a ridiculously slow pace of 13:15 minute/mile. The week before I completed a practice 5K with a 11:30 mile pace, which is still more of a turtle trot then a diva dash, but the idea of running 35 minutes straight had seemed impossible 10 weeks ago.

If any of you want to start running or jogging or plodding in my case...whatever you want to call it, I highly suggest downloading a Couch to 5K podcast. I've tried to start this program about 6 times since high school and never made it past week 2. The way it works is you run a certain amount of time and then walk, each week increasing the amount of running. Doing it with a stopwatch was near to impossible for me, so this time I looked up some podcasts. I never found one that really matched my music tastes, but I found one that had enough songs I knew that kept me going. http://runningintoshape.com/ She lets you know when to start running and walking. Plus, her story is pretty inspirational. She was morbidly obese and through diet and exercise, mainly running, she is slowly losing all of the weight.

I can't say that I love running. There were days where the best part was just making it to the cool down. Some days it did feel empowering during the run. Of course, I almost always felt better afterwards, but I wouldn't call that a "runner's high." I get that high if I do a cheesy jazzercise tape in my living room. Coming from a family of runners who love to talk about running and compete, this whole 10 weeks was sort of a mental barrier for me. As a kid you could always count on me to be dead last in the PE run, which was a joke in our family since my mom was a PE teacher. How embarrassing on school open house nights when she met my PE teachers! I rarely ran the whole distance in PE because I was last even if I ran the entire time. I definitely never broke the 10- minute-mile mark to earn a B. I'm jealous of my mom's current students who use heart rate monitors. It proves for some students a 12- minute-mile really is getting their heart rate up to 200, and then they can improve with that as the baseline.

Maybe things have changed in the past 15 years since many non-athletic people now run. Finishing in the top only seems to matter to the small group of competitive runners. Especially in a 5K race, it's like most people say "yay for exercise! Let's go run a race and get a t-shirt!" That was inspiring on Saturday. We were all there together being crazy people running in the first snow storm of the season. It didn't matter if I was at the back of the pack. So I'm going to sign up for another one with the goal to run the entire way, and then I'll see where I go from there. There's one on New Year's Day that has a really nice fleece lined windbreaker for all runners....hmmmm...is that worth running in 10 degree weather? I might stick to my indoors aerobics videos for the next couple of months and wait for a June race.