bitful

Yesterday I entered my first race and completed a 5 kilometres (3.1 miles) run.

It is probably not a big deal for most, but I consider it a great achievement, because as recently as last January I could not run for more than ten minutes without being out of breath.

I trained regularly, went for lunchtime runs with colleagues and on the treadmill at the gym, slowly built up my endurance and lately started working on speed too.

In early April I gave Dr B. an iPod nano for his birthday, as well as the Nike+ iPod sport kit that logs your running data and uploads it to the Nike+ website where you can set yourself goals and launch/join challenges with other people. I liked it so much that I got one myself.

I twittered about it and Gordon invited me to join the April Fools challenge (whoever runs the most KM during April) where I ended up at a very honourable second place.

Dr B. challenged me to whoever runs 100KM first, so every night when we get home we plug our iPods and check on the website who is winning. Thanks to last night's race, I am currently in the lead by a very small margin.

I do not consider myself as highly competitive, but I'll be honest with you: there have been days where I would gladly have skipped training but the prospect of having to see Dr B.'s smug winner face prodded me to go the extra mile - quite literally.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 7:20 am and last modified on May 4th, 2007 at 9:26 am, and is filed under health and fitness, personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.