Just a few minutes before my first 5k!!!
I made an impromptu decision to give my first 5K a try! I was heading down to Bemidji, Minnesota for a family overnight at a good friend’s house. He is a single dad and a drummer in a band – they often play in our area and we have he and his son as weekend guests and watch his boy for him. His son Isaak is two weeks older than our 4 year old, Henry. This time he was playing in the evening for “Turtle River Days” and it was an outdoor even where kids were welcome, so we’d get to see him play for a change. I looked at the list of festivities and realized the day started with a 5k. Turtle River is one of those tiny Minnesota towns that doesn’t have a post office, but has lots of bars (one of those “used to be just outside of an alcohol prohibition zone” towns). I thought that even though I haven’t completed my Couch to 5K program and my time was too slow to have gotten farther than about 2.3 miles or so in the allotted app time, I’d give it a go. I thought it would be a smaller race where I likely wouldn’t know anybody too well and I could flail as much as I needed to with little social consequence.
It was a hot, muggy start to the day. There were 27 racers, some of them kids. Unlike other ones I’d participated in by walking with a stroller, there was only one person in this race that solely walked. They were an encouraging group of fairly serious runners. I passed up the walking lady in the first couple minutes while she was reading a brochure. I couldn’t help but jokingly thinking, “Oh yeah! In your face, brochure lady! You just got passed by a woman twice your size!”…oh the glory.
We turned and ran along a lake side ATV trail that used to be a rail road track – now super soft sand. I hadn’t caught that we were actually running to a table at the halfway point with water and then turning around and going back the way I came. So I wasn’t sure what the lead guy was doing running towards me. A couple people later, I figured it out. I thought “that must mean that I’m almost at the halfway point!!!” Wrong. In the end, I finished almost exactly 10 minutes behind the 25th place runner. Despite my best efforts, I had to slow down and walk off and on during the race. The last stretch was up hill (we don’t have hills by my house) and the walking lady was gaining on me. Determined not to be passed by a woman who read a brochure while walking, I put a little last minute ooomf into it and finished a second ahead of her. Victory!!! The guy in charge of tracking the times seemed a bit surprised when I enthusiastically wanted to know my time. I told him, “I know it was quite awful, but this is my first 5K. I need to know my time so I can see how much better I’m getting for later ones.” My end time was 53:15. Hopefully it will only go up from here. Feeling proud, a bit sore, and ok that I am slow…for now.
The bottom photo is just after my first 5K! They gave us all cute little medals with a turtle on it. I’m wearing a butterfly pin and necklace in honor of my daughter, Nara. When she died, I used to long to be with her and look forward to meeting again in heaven. As I got healthier, I realized that someday one of my boys might have a little girl that reminds me of Nara and I could help raise her and watch her grow. My boys are only 15 and 4, but I knew I needed to start now if I wanted to be a healthy grandma when they become parents. So she helped me start in a more healthy direction.
northwoodsmamma 
