Run Forrest Run

Wow, a lot has happened since I posted last, not sure where to start. I might start with the negatives and finish on a high

The Bad, or as some of my amazing friends would say FFS.... My car died :( It is with the mechanic right now. I had to get a ride with the tow truck driver on Monday night after work to get my car home and to get me home. The car is going to cost around $2k to get fixed. I’m sure anyone reading this is just like us and does not just have that sort of money just lying around. I have had to call the bank and get a stop on the mortgage this month so that we will have the money to pay for the car to be fixed. I am hoping it will be ready for me to collect today. 3 days with no car is not fun. Tuesday was my day off so not so bad, it just meant I was stuck at home for the day, yesterday hubby took me to work and picked me up and this morning one of my staff came and collected me to take me to work and I will probably get someone else from work to take me home.

The Good - well really, the scary. There is an annual fun run – Run Geelong – that benefits Geelong hospital children’s ward. Last year I signed up for the 6km course and walked the majority of the course (I may have run 500metres), upon signing up again this year I knew after all the hard work I’ve put in over the last 9 months dropping my weight and improving my fitness,  I could run the entire 6km. I then decided that wasn’t a big enough challenge. The run is 3 months away so I thought why not sign up for the 12km run and give myself something to focus on and train towards over the next 12 weeks, so that’s what I did. Hubby, who can’t stand running, has chosen to sign up with me, not only to support me but to also give him a focus and a reason to get out there, train and improve his fitness. Now anyone that knows me knows that this is a BIG deal. I am the girl who does not run! I have always claimed that I CAN’T run, but guess what? After training in the gym for the last 5-6 months and slowly increasing my time running on the treadmill, something must’ve worked. I decided last week to head out for my first run just to see what I could do & hey presto I knocked over 5km. I went out a few days later and smashed another 5km. So now I have a plan – 12 weeks to push that 5km to 12km. After talking to a girl at work who is a PT and doing a bit of research, the plan is to now focus on increasing that distance bit by bit, week by week. This week I will be chasing a 6km run, and then we’ll add another km, etc etc as well as that I have been advised to do some interval runs and hill runs to increase my running fitness. This has really helped me forget about being upset about not being involved in 12WBT this round as I still have a 12 week focus. My focus is now not on the scales, I’m really not concerned about my weight right now, what I am doing now is fitness focused and my new number chasing is increasing those pesky kms. So even though my new focus is running, I still need to fit in my weight training to maintain strength, so on Tuesday, stranded at home with no car I figured I would run to the gym, so I got out there, ran to the gym, did my weight session and then ran home. A total of 3.6km run plus weights took me an hour and I achieved my best calorie burn for a 1 hour session (585) and my fastest km (4min 5sec) – clearly not a time I can keep running at but a quick km to begin my session.

Back at work last week looking online at some other runs that are in the area I discovered a 10km run 2 weeks prior to the 12km run and I thought that would be good preparation to know what to expect the following fortnight. So I signed up for that too. I have gone in 2 weeks from being the girl who can’t run to the girl who is training for her 1^st 10km fun run, quickly followed by her 1^st 12km fun run. My brother has started calling me Forrest – hence my blog title. I certainly have no aspirations to run a record time for these events, I am going to be happy just to finish them without stopping. Once these events are over I guess I then need to tackle Greg and his crazy idea that I can run the Geelong ½ marathon with him in April........Maybe Greg, Maybe (but that’s not a No)

So what’s on the agenda this week? Spend a heap of cash on my car, then try to find $$ and time to get fitted for a new pair of runners and just keep running