couch to 5k

I am soooo psyched to say that the hubs and I are running our first 5k on Thanksgiving morning, Krogh's Turkey Trot! As I've mentioned before, I'm totally not a runner. I haven't really run any long distances since field hockey in high school (which was quite a while ago...as in coming up on my 10-year reunion ago). I don't really know what started us off, but in the summer we started jogging to my parents' house to swim and ride bikes, and then jogging back. We kind of ramped it up from there. I'm not sure when we decided to do the 5k thing, but we've been "training" since then. Training really just means running a few times a week for 2 to 4 miles at a time, whenever we can.
We were doing really well for a while. Then that one-two punch combo of Hurricane Sandy and the time change made it impossible to go running after hubs comes home from work. We have had to scale it back to the weekends, but still try to fit in at least 2 runs a week! That first run we went on after we had to take 2 1/2 weeks off was pretty tough, and by pretty tough I mean that I wanted to lie down in the middle of the road and let my lungs collapse and not ever run another step again.
We are just about back to where we were before we had our little setbacks. One of the tools that I used to base our runs was the popular "Couch to 5k" program that you may or may not have already seen on pinterest. I'm going to share it in case it might be of any use to you. We changed it up a little, but used this as a minimum guideline for our runs each week in order to get ready.

 

ps...this is TOTALLY necessary to prep for the total calorie overload that will occur later Thanksgiving day! Maybe, just maybe, I'll burn off a piece of pumpkin cheesecake preemptively!