Another First

Another first today, but for something a little bit different the first wasn't for me.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the week, this morning was the annual Break Your Limits fund raising fun run. The run takes place every year in King's Park to help raise some funds for the junior members. This year the run included a 5 and a 10km option and we had a nice 60 to 70 people take part. Lovely.

The first of the day was that the fun run also happened to be my wife's first ever 5km run.

Regular readers will know that my wife has been exercising fairly consistently for most of this year now. This exercise has allowed her to achieve a few firsts, most notably completing her first ever triathlon earlier this year.

Since that triathlon the training has been continuing on fairly consistently. There have been a few quiet weeks due to injury, nasty winter weather and our trip to Darwin, but on the whole the training has been progressing well. Well enough that when the run came along for the year we thought we would give it a go.

Leading into today's run we were fairly confident that my wife would get through. Before today she hadn't run 5km continuously, but she had done plenty of runs/walks over 5km, so we thought she would get through. Still, with the aforementioned interruptions to training, we weren't quite sure how it would go.

Turns out that it would go fine.

In fact really it went more than fine. Our goal for the run was to get through the entire thing without having to walk. For her first 5km run that was going to be a solid request, but add in the difficult of the course and the non walking goal starting looking like quite an ask.

The course for the fun run is always a challenging one. Being in King's Park means the is not particularly flat and for added fun it is usually mostly done on sandy trails. This year was no different, with the first 1500m running up hill through sand. Doing your first 5km run is daunting enough, having to do it over a sandy, hilly track is something else all together.

Still, my wife stuck with and steadily worked her way around the course, working hard, but consistently and never faltering. Just like when she did her first triathlon, I couldn't be prouder. At the beginning of this year I am not sure she ever would have believed that she would be doing the BYL 5km run in July, but there she was, doing it today.

It just goes to show the value of setting a goal, making a plan and working through that plan steadily and consistently.

Whether your goal is running 5km or doing an Ironman, the methodology to achieve the unthinkable is always the same. Make the goal, make a plan, commit to the plan and follow through on it. Do that and the unthinkable can become the achievable.