Graduation Day for Road to Wellness

COVID-19, “ The Rona Era”

Today is graduation day for our Road to Wellness 5k group. Every Saturday for the last three months, they came to the free clinic to learn how to walk and run. They trained for their 5k run all throughout the summer. For me, the season runner, this was training I needed for my recovery comeback. After reconstruction surgery and during the radiation process, I needed a training program to slowly start back into running. This was great. I didn’t have to do this alone. Every saturday I was around an amazing and interesting group of folks who showed up for a variety of reasons. There were other cancer survivors, folks who had a loss of some sort and was trying to heal, others who thought this was awesome and wanted to be around a group of runners too. The bonus of the free training clinic, were the coaches and yoga afterwards. All of this would have normally been an $125 session with these coaches if not more.

I had so fun meeting new people and seeing the progress from June until now. Seeing people who weren’t runners, start to run. We encouraged and motivated each other through this process.

Today, everyone had a mock race experience to get ready for 9/11. There were bib numbers, sign in sheets, music, cheer squad, timed race, and we ran on the course. This was more of a feeler out kind of thing. 50 of us, ran the mock course for graduation today.

It was meant to be because the weather was a perfect 67 degrees, cool and no humidity.

After some words of motivation. We got ready to run the course. Since I knew the course, I just ran. It was great to have volunteers to guide the runners where to go.

I made a mistake. I turned down a side street too soon. I didn’t know they extended the race route a bit further. So I ran 2.97 miles instead of 3.1 miles. I claim it and still got a 5k in.

Looking forward to race day.

2.97 miles : 29:38

9:58 ave pace

Mile 1: 10:01

Mile 2: 9:36

Mile 2.97: 10:16