In my list of 35 events over the course of a year (give or take), I finally crossed off event number 2! The Rudolph Ramble in Lincoln Park (Chicago) was my first 8K ever! Luckily, there was a Midwest “heat wave” that left us with temperatures around 40 degrees that morning. AWESOME! I am learning the art of layering for outdoor activity, but that day my base tech layers were:
Nike Element Shield Running Tights
Nike Pro Hyperwarm Crew 3.0 Top
Topped it all off with the first red t-shirt I found (keep it festive/match the bib) and some RMHC socks!
The race was tough. Its the furthest distance I’ve ever attempted to run. I kept ended up with a run-walk pace that was all over the place for the first two miles (leaving me burned out by mile 2. My friends recommended I start with a 3:2 (3 min run, 2 min walk) alternating pace, but I thought that seemed too easy, so I set my shiny new TomTom Runner for a 6:2 interval. Boy was I wrong. That did not go so well. I spent the final 3 miles doing the math in my head to convert my 6:2 setting to a 3:1 setting, which I also found pretty difficult to maintain. At the finish line my coworkers were waiting and cheering.
Considering I had just started running less than 2 months prior, I didn’t care about being ranked 1,031 out of 1,113… I was more than satisfied with the simple accomplishment of actually finishing it!
| 2014 | Pace | Finish Place | Final Time | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Age | Gender | Overall | |||
| Rudolph RambleChicago, IL, US • Dec 14th | 13:07 Min/Mi | 124 | 623 | 1,031 | 1:05:13 |
I signed up for another 8K in March, so we can see how much I am able to improve my time and consistency of pace by then…
therealcherish 
I’ve been running for 3ish years now, and I still do either a 1:1 or run 1: walk 30 sec. Running more than a minute at a time just tires me out too fast.
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Its been a struggle to get up to 3 minutes of running sometimes. I definitely have had days where I have struggled to do a full 2 or 3 minutes. It probably doesn’t help that I started in the winter and the cold air is not kind to my asthma. I find the first mile the hardest hurdle to get past, but after that my breathing is better and I’m more warmed up. I’m going to work on dropping the walk down to 1 minute over the next couple of months.
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Congrats! You go girl! Keep up the great work!
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Thanks so much!!!
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