At the beginning of the year, Michael said that one of his goals would be to get in shape and ready to run his first 5k. His pick, the Gasparilla Distance Classic in 3 months. To be totally honest with you, I wasn’t 101% sure that he was going to pull that one off. Not because he couldn’t but because he is always so busy and has a hard time finding time to train. But he started getting up super early and worked really hard and was completely ready by race day.
Fast forward a couple weeks after that, and the getting up early part had begun to slack off quite a bit. I don’t blame him, faithfully making the dreaded pilgrimage to the gym is the hardest part for me too. So I was trying to think of ways to help him find that motivation again. The Gasparilla seemed to really inspire him before so I looked up a calendar of local races on runtampa.com.
There was a run coming up in a week and a half that looked like fun and was in our favorite area of tampa so I told him that he was going to run in it. His exact response was something like “HAH! yeah right” if I remember correctly. But I told him that I knew he could do it if he really tried so he agreed that I could sign him up the next day if registration was still open. His train of thought was that surely this close to the race he wouldn’t be able to enter and therefore would buy some more time before the next one. Unfortunately for him, registration was still open and I signed him up the next day!!
He had 9 days to get back on track which was very challenging after having not run in so long. But one of the things I admire the most about Michael is his ability to face a challenge head on and focus on completing whatever it is. So he was up at 5:30am daily and once again, by race day, he was ready to go!
He later told me that he was NOT happy with me for the first part of the race for having pushed him to go for it (lol!) but thanked me later. He not only was able to finish the race but beat his Gasparilla time by about 10 seconds!! Pretty impressive for someone who had only picked running back up 9 days before!! I am SO proud of him for even deciding to go for it and finishing at all. He has decided to keep up doing races because they help him stay active and he really enjoys them so I’m sure we will have many more posts about faster and fast times!
LOOKIN GREAT MIKE!!!!
You’re doin great! Glad you’re in the 30% of Americans exercise regularly (if – unlike me – you believe that statistic is accurate).