My First Race

Well, I guess at this point, it’s time to ‘fess up regarding where I stood.  After all, in order to prove I’d made progress, I’d have to “weigh in” with some regularity.  On the day I started training, my weight was 242 lb.  To put that in perspective, I’m 6′2″ tall, and at the time was 32 years old.

We’ll get to the subject of BMI, percent body fat, and all that good stuff later.  Suffice it to say, I weighed too much.

Training for my first race

Since I’m setting the stage for what I’ve learned in the past, I won’t bore everyone with the details, with a handful of exceptions.

First off, I promised myself that I would not, under any circumstances, view this as a competitive endeavor.  Anyone who knows me would understand that was no small task.  Unfortunately, my training partner is just as competitive as am I, but we didn’t get too rowdy.  I was afraid that competition would lead to early injuries, and ultimately, failure.  My target was to make modest changes and hope for modest, stepwise improvements.

A brief comment about equipment.  Fortunately, for running or walking, all you really need is a pair of shoes.  The first few weeks, I was wearing an old pair of crosstrainers that had the tread worn off the bottom.  In the later stages of training, I decided there was real value in upgrading to an actual “running” shoe.  You can find these anywhere.  I settled on a pair of Asics Kayano X, purchased from Road Runner Sports.  Why?  It’s a stability shoe, (read:  for heavy people), and it felt good on my foot.  I’m sure anything would have worked as well for me at that point.  I’ll talk more about my experience with equipment later as well.

The end result

Suffice it to say, we finished the race.  My final time was 34 minutes and 39 seconds.  Nothing at all to get excited about.  To be honest, it was very bad, but I promised myself I would only attempt to finish the event, and that’s what I did.

My training partner had upped his goal to completing the event in under 30-minutes.  He also accomplished this goal.  Unfortunately, his wife informed me that he spent the remainder of the weekend (it was a Saturday morning race) laying on the couch complaining about how much pain he was in.  He denies such an event ever occurred.  I guess you’ll have to be the judge of what really happened…

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