Tom's Blog

This will be a 4 part series for anyone interested.

Well, it was the begining of a new year, and I had fallen off of my loosing weight horse, and had put back on all that I had lost in 2007 and few extra lbs that I had found along the way. Joe had just had a minor health scare and was looking to make some changes in his own lifestyle.

It was now the end of February, and the subject of the Mini marathon came up around the office. It was suggested by one of our co-workers that we should run in it if we wanted to get in shape. That only left us 2 months to get prepared, and although we are a couple of optomistic guys, we weren't crazy. We did make the decision that we would run it in 2009, and we would train and run some smaller 5K events to keep us motivated.

I actually went for my first run during the first week of March, if you can call that a run. It was about a 15 mpm pace for about a half mile, and I thought I was going to quit breathing. I was wondering if this was even going to work, but I knew Joe wasn't going to quit so I wasn't either. Over the next couple of weeks I continued to run as best I could in prepartion for our first race. It would be the Healthcare Classic 5K downtown on March 22.

There was a lot of anticipation leading up to race day. None of us know quite what to expect. We ended up recruiting 3 other runners and someone willing to take pictures for us. We ended up being joined by Dremia, Joe's wife, and Heather a coworker, and her husband. When we arrived there that morning at the opening of packet pickup, we weren't going to be late, it was quite cool. We were standing around outside watching all the runners comming in and very few of them looked like me. They were mostly younger college students and at least appeared to be in shape. At least better shape than I was at that point still over the 200 lb mark.

The longer we stood outside, the colder it seemed. We eventually ended up finding us a place to move inside as we still had about a 45 minute wait. While we were all waiting there in our bright orange colored shirts (you can see pictures here) we couldn't help but notice one guy running all over the place at a pretty good clip in shorts and thanking that dude was a machine. We felt a little intimidated to say the least, or at least I was.

It finally got to race time, and I think we were all more than ready to get started both to get warmed up, and to just get past the anticipation. We all ended up having a pretty decent race considering the time we had in to that point. That race ended up being my 5K PR for all of 2008. Kind of hard to complain about that other than maybe I wasn't training hard enough for the at least some of the year. I also tended to opt more for longer races, but that is a story for the next part.