Hello!

Hi, I'm Sara, Erin's friend from college, and I'll be running along with her. For me, it's definitely couch (read: lazing around in bed) to 5K! My comprehensive exam this past semester (I'm in a PhD program) really killed my will to live/exercise ;) and now that the semester is over and I don't have to walk 20 minutes to campus every day, I've really gotten bad about getting exercise. Erin has definitely inspired me to be more active this summer. :) The running to music has worked really well for me too (this was my third day), and is much more fun than other running I've done in the past. I've just been running around my neighborhood in Berkeley, CA, which is pretty flat and not too many folks on the sidewalk.

I'm also excited to try running. Everyone else in my family is a really impressive runner (especially my sister, who was in high school and college cross country and track)...in the past, I've gone to the Akron Children's Hospital 5K with them...and while everyone else was running the 5K and winning trophies, I would run/walk in the 1 mile "fun run". So here's to being able to run the 5K with them someday! At least all their running might mean I have the genes to be a runner even if I haven't succeeded in the past??

My goal for the summer is basically just to feel healthier...I feel good about my weight overall, but not about my ratio of muscles to fat...basically, I am about zero muscles right now. :) I've also noticed this past semester that I've been getting out of breath faster than I want to, so obviously running should be good for that. I've also been doing a little bit of strength training on our new Wii Fit and I want to keep that up and add some exercises that don't work on the Wii Fit (i.e. situps)...for that, I need to clean my room so I have a place to do them! I don't have too much going on this summer (I'm working part time and trying to study for comprehensive exam number 2 in the fall), so I'm going to pencil myself in for running every day, which may or may not actually happen. I figure that if I try for every day, I will at least run the 3 days required by the program! So far it has been working as I've run the past three days. I can actually feel it getting easier, so that's encouraging!

I don't seem to have very much "short" music, so what I did was make a 10 minute playlist and I play it twice through for my run. Not as exciting as Jazzerpat but it gets the job done. :) It's a funny mix of the Amelie soundtrack and the Into the Wild soundtrack, with the best song definitely being the West Wing theme song. The "presidential" sounding music is very inspirational and I can imagine I am Josh going for a run! I will have to figure out a way to incorporate it next week when I've graduated from the "run 1 minute" level.

Here's my playlist for this week, with running songs in red and walking songs in pink:

Photographs - Eddie Vedder (0:59)
L'Autre Valse D'Amelie - Yann Tiersen (1:33)
Tuolumne - Eddie Vedder (1:00)
Le Banquet - Yann Tiersen (1:31)
West Wing Theme Song (0:46)
Setting Forth - Eddie Vedder (1:40)
La Redecouverte - Yann Tiersen (1:13)
No Ceiling - Eddie Vedder (1:34)

Total Time: 10.2 minutes, to be played twice for 1 run/walk.

Here's where I've been running so far. According to Google Maps, it's about .8 miles each way for a total of 1.6 miles...not bad!



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