A 5K Race

Last Wednesday, I ran in the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Callenge: a 3.5 mile race along the SF bay. It all started 10 weeks ago when I got an email from a coworker about the race and I thought it might be a good way to get in shape. I started preparing for the race by googling for a running guide. Google, being the great search engine it is, returned this page among its results. "A guide to running 5k in 10 weeks" and the description followed, "A guide that will transform you from a coach potato to a runner in 10 weeks". Perfect! So I started following the website's guide taking advantage of the running track close to my apt. For the first 5 weeks I was on schedule, running 3 times a week and increasing the load every week. But then I went on vacation for 3 weeks and needless to say that was the end of my training. I came back gaining weight and out of shape. So for the remaining 2 weeks, I decided to follow a different strategy and not practice at all. To my surprise, on the race day I ran the whole way non-stop finishing in 35 minutes which is not bad for a first race. The thing that definitely helped was the hundreds of people running in the race. I was expecting someone to stop along the way so I would stop too, but no one stopped till the finish line.