Push Yourself

I have run a few 5k races and manage just fine, not much training or anything other than my regular trying to go to the gym... so when I saw that there was a 10k for women coming up and me with all this free time, I decided to register. The first step was that I needed new shoes. I have a hard time swallowing the $100 price tag on good running shoes, especially when the money I have coming in at the moment is minimal, but my physical health is important and the chance of injury if I don't have proper shoes increases exponentially.

Now I just have to get myself to do some practice runs, especially considering that I have 2 weeks to prepare. There's a nice bike path by our house so I decided to take advantage and try it out. I thought a lot about it and spent most of the day coming up with excuses of why I should do other things instead of run so by the time I was going to leave the house it was starting to get dark, instead of letting that be another road block for myself I grabbed my headlamp. The bike path does not have lights and since it is used by cyclists I need them to be able to see me so they don't run into me and I don't topple them over. I wore it like a bracelet and it worked really well to provide some illumination in front of me and make me noticeable to others on the path. Then I also had to push myself to keep going. My initial goal was to run about 1.5 miles out and turn around and loop back but once I hit that point I challenged myself to push farther and continued another half mile down the path before turning around. It felt really good to get off my but and get out there and to go farther than I had expected to. Now to keep my motivation for a few more runs before the 10k.