Week 3 Prep, Run 3

Run/walk: 30 minutes

Actually, 32 minutes, but I'm not going to be that precise!

The real difference between today's run and previous runs was that I didn't do a five-minute warmup walk. I just warmed up for two minutes, then went ahead and started running. So I ended up doing six five-minute intervals of run/walking instead of one interval of walking and five intervals of run/walking. I felt fine -- even over-ran my last interval for about twenty seconds before I looked at my watch and noticed I should be walking. So I guess my bad patch is over.

I'm still not 100% sure about doing the AIDS Marathon. Sometimes I think about the effort and expense of raising $1500, and getting up at 5:00 AM to drive two hours to LA once a week with gas at nearly $3 a gallon (especially in the winter, with a foot of snow on the ground some of those early Sunday mornings), and keeping up a training schedule three times a week for six months, and it all seems overwhelming.

And then I think about the way I feel after a good run, and how fun it was doing the group runs with my pace group, and finally getting healthy again, and how much easier it is to keep at it when I've got a goal and a commitment to motivate me, and I really want to do this.

When I was considering my first AIDS Marathon, I looked at it this way: okay, suppose I sign up for this and work at it for a while, and find that I can't raise the money or can't keep up with the runs, and decide to drop out. What's the downside? I've contributed some money to a good cause, and gotten some exercise. Even if I don't go the whole way, I don't lose anything. There is no bad there.

So, I think I'll go ahead and send in my registration tomorrow, and see how it goes.