A Budding Runner

I've always dreamed of sharing my love of running with my daughter, Rebecka. (Well, at least since I've been a runner and she's been old enough to run.) In the past, I've made a few futile attempts to get her to run with me on a regular basis, but it always fizzled out due to life (travel, illness, cold weather, you name it...).

After the 5K fun last weekend, I decided to invite Todd and Rebecka to run the Jingle Bell Run with me. For Todd, this is cake, considering that a 5K run is an "easy" day for him. For Rebecka, however, running even 0.5 miles is generally a stretch (she recently came home from school huffing and puffing because they made her run the aforementioned distance at gym class). So, we turned to runnersworld.com to see if we could find a good beginning runner's training plan to get ready for a 5K in six weeks. Sure enough, the running experts beat my expectations with a five week plan that starts the budding runner off at 10 minutes of running and gradually gets her up to 3.5 miles.

Rebecka faithfully followed the plan this past week and today, she ran two miles! I am so proud of her!! And it's not like she ran two miles and then collapsed. No, she cooled down with a slow walk, biked a mile while I finished my run, and then we did a full session of strength training together. With five weeks to go until the race, we should all be in great shape to finish the race and hopefully not freeze to death.

Persistence does pay off...