Posted by Lindsay Beeson on January 20, 2012. 4 comments.

These feet! They ran this morning!

That dawgface! … OK. She didn’t help me run, but she helped make a cute photo (and I’m kinda thinking she needs to squirm her way to Star of Lindsay’s Blog. The eyes. The moufspace. The perfect schnozzle).

Back to my feet. And to my 10k goal. It’ll be a relatively slow start. I plan to use the beginner’s plan for this 10k training schedule on Cool Running.

Included in the plan, as laid out, is four to five weeks of pre-training to make sure you’re ready for the real thing. The pre-training is five days a week of four- or three-mile runs. And the thing is, I’m not sure I’m totally ready for that. So I’m setting myself up a little pre-training pre-train.

This week: three days of 28-minute runs. Next week: three days of 30-minute runs.

A good start

I woke up this morning ready to work. I had my coffee and oatmeal breakfast, gave it time to settle, and hit the sidewalks for a chilly, hilly run.

I’m not kidding about hilly: there were two monsters at about three blocks apiece that slowed me down quite a bit. But I plowed through and found a surprise: the climb was hard while I was doing it, but once I got the top and settled into the flat/downhill, I felt normal. No worse for the wear. Happy little discoveries.

Because my focus for these runs is time, not distance, I’ve gone out blind: no planned route; I barely know the turns I’ll be taking half a mile down the road. I just go where my feet go. And no looking at the clock. Just eyes on the path ahead, head in the clouds.

After some countless number of blocks, I marked a spot on my course to check my watch, mentally prepared that I’d have to put in an additional five minutes to finish my training.

I got to the spot. I checked my watch. Six minutes. Six minutes more than the 28 I set out to do. “Jesus! Holy sh*t!” I said it. I hope there weren’t any little ears to hear me.

To make it even, I kept running until I hit a nice, round 35 minutes. And I walked home feeling pretty good about the way I started my day, and started this very long journey to a 10k.