The first 5K

One day, I said to my roommate Jackie: Hey, I've been thinking about running a half-marathon at the end of the summer. Do you want to run it with me?

Jackie: That sounds hard. I don't like running. How far is a half-marathon?

Me: 13.1 miles--which sounds long, but we have like five months to train for it. I don't like running either, but wouldn't it be awesome to have accomplished that? I mean, what else are we doing this summer?

Jackie (very hesitantly): I don't know. I'll think about it.

The next day, I said to Jackie: So I started looking up half-marathons online and there's some really good ones at the end of August . . .

Jackie: That sounds hard. I don't like running. I'll think about it.

The day after that, I said to Jackie: So I've been looking at training schedules for half-marathons . . .

Jackie: That sounds hard. I don't like running. I'll think about it.

Some time later that week, I said to Jackie: So I think we need to start training for our half-marathon as soon as my classes are over at the end of April. The weather will be nice then and I'll have a flexible schedule . . .

I continued to mention 'our' half-marathon in every conversation with Jackie for the next few weeks. One day, I said to Jackie: Did I ever tell you that I'm obnoxiously persistent?

When I say that I 'roped' my roommate into running with me with me, I really mean it.

We've been training for a month now, but I think today is the day she really got on board. Today, we ran our first 5K (3.2 miles).

We started out a little slow because we were in the back of the pack. But then we started passing people.

Which was a lot of fun.

And we kept passing people as they either slowed down, started walking, or wimped out altogether.

Jackie and I kept a steady pace the whole way through and RAN all the way to the finish line. Our time was about 32 minutes, which is what we expected since we tend to average 10-minute miles no matter what the distance is.

Since this was the first race for both of us, we were pretty happy just to finish. My parents showed up to be supportive (and because they don't have anywhere better to be on a Saturday morning) and said we finished somewhere in the middle. I was pretty happy about that. We're not fast (we're not actually 'runners' after all), but we're consistent. We've been working hard and it's paying off.

We posted our race numbers up on the fridge like children's artwork or good test scores. They're just that awesome.

Note: Since no one remembered to bring a camera to the race, the picture above was taken back at our apartment building half an hour later.