W1R3 (take 2) - catching up on what I've done: Part 2

[Cohii]

I was just looking at my blogs, expecting to see a nice record of my progress, but apparently I've forgotten to actually post! So I decided to write up my last three runs as a record for myself to look back on in weeks to come and see how far I've progressed.

I went on holiday after my slow and difficult final Week 1 run, and I hadn't run for 2 weeks, but I swam a lot and walked down cliff faces. After a couple days back home I decided it was time to get back into it. I was a little nervous about running again because my last run had been so exhausting.

My best friend, Becky, lives far away but is doing the C25K challenge with me from afar, so I was excited to do a run with her while she was still with me after our hoilday. I've never run with someone before! Together we then nabbed my brother, who had sworn off running, saying he hated it and just didn't feel like trying. Somehow we talked him into doing the run with us.

We drove to a park we'd never visited before in search of an outdoor gym to use. We warmed up on the equipment there, then plugged in a splitter to my ipod for Becky and me to use our own headphones. My brother lined up his own running playlist on his as he doesn't have the podcasts yet. And off we went!

At each walk we'd group up and walk together, then I'd tell my brother when it was time to run, and off we'd go. We discovered something about my brother's running. He's fast. I mean seriously fast. I have no idea how he's so fast! Especially for someone who's supposed to hate running. I'd say "Go" and he'd rocket off ahead, looking like he was hardly putting in any effort at all, leaving us jogging way behind panting away. We looked so funny that we even got a laughing comment from a dogwalker near the end of our run, who was watching him jog past, with us trailing along about 10 yards behind.

For the most part I didn't find this run too difficult. I loved running as a group, it kept my mind off my legs and how long was left, and we could all laugh together about how silly we looked at times, and, ah it was just lovely and comraderly. The park was lovely and had lots of variety going on, and lots of cute and strange dogs to notice as we ran our twisted route around it. Near the of the half hour there were a couple runs that were a little more challenging, but that was mainly because we sped up a little more and pushed ourselves a bit.

We finished at the car with a session of skipping, which I haven't done in years.

All in all it was a very pleasant and happy end to my very drawn out 3 week long first week of C25K.