Matt Gets Running

FX: Fan­fare. Brrrrup-pa-pa-pa-pa-paaa-paaaah!

Whoo-hoo! Tonight was Week 9, Run 3 of the Couch to 5K. Ear­lier on, I made a deci­sion about tonight. Instead of the time, it would be about the distance.

Because I don’t think, in all hon­esty, that you can say you’ve com­pleted the Couch to 5K until you’ve actu­ally, you know, run 5K.

So, for my final run I made the hard deci­sion to put aside Get Run­ning and instead dig out Run­K­eeper. Because while Get Run­ning has been my stead­fast com­pan­ion, and while I still hugely pre­fer Clare’s voice and Ben’s fab user inter­face, Get Run­ning won’t mea­sure your dis­tance, and Run­K­eeper will.

So I set it up to give me a five minute warm-up, a five minute cool-down, and two 2.5km stretches of run­ning in between (so I’d know when to turn around at halfway.)

And I got running.

Tonight I went out along the main road on the other side of the river from my nor­mal tow­path route — a good choice, because it’s get­ting dark early now, and the tow­path is unlit.

As I’ve noticed before, a rub­bish night of strug­gling run­ning, like Tuesday’s effort, is often fol­lowed by a nice easy run, and tonight was no excep­tion. I just ran, and it felt pretty easy, and there was never any point at which I felt like I wanted to stop. I ran all the way out, I turned around when Run­K­eeper told me my 2.5km was done, and I ran all the way back. Job done!

So, I can now in all good con­science say that I’ve com­pleted the C25K! And I’ve run 5K for the first time in my life. Yabbadabbadoo!

Any­way. Must go get my cel­e­bra­tory pizza out of the oven. More run­ning to come on this blog at some point soon, but in the mean­time, I’d like to say a quick thank you to Ben­john, Arline, Tiff, and any­one else who’s helped out, com­mented, or just been read­ing my run­ning wit­ter­ings as I’ve done this.

For pos­ter­ity, here’s the route (includ­ing the warm-up and cool-down.) Hit the view details link for all the stats:

Che­quered flag image by nionx, on stockxpert.com.