Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Running

Our daughters have been running lately and so I got the bug. Actually our oldest daughter infected me. She's been running for a few months (overcoming asthma) and recently ran (and finished) her first 5K. Our other daughter just had a baby and has also started running. The original running-germ carrier recommended a book by Jeff Galloway titled 'Running-Getting Started'. It's exactly the type of program we need. His approach is to keep you from getting tired and needing a rest. The program starts very easy and builds up. Anyway, it didn't seem too intimidating, so this morning was our first 'run', and we survived. Of course, we only had to run for 10 seconds and walk for 2 minutes for a total of 10 minutes with warm-up and warm-downs of about 5 minutes each, so you can see why we survived (we're used to a 30 minute walk). We will do this for a week (only 3 days with walking days in between), then we increase it a little.

We don't have a wonderful, cushioned track to run on (like our daughters), so we are running down a quiet neighborhood street. So far so good with no running injuries or cars running over us. I used to run before we got married and my husband ran cross-country in high school. We are excited about this and look forward to running greater distances and time. There is an elderly man (maybe late 70s) in our neighborhood who runs on a regular basis so we can use him as inspiration, also. In fact, today when we saw him, I wanted to start running to show him that we could do it, too, but we were in a walking cycle. Oh well, it would have paled compared to him as we think he runs several miles.