Training for the Race

The unusual race that I will be doing is called an Urbanathlon. It is held in 3 different cities, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. It is a 10 mile race through the city combined with 6 different obstacles. You can opt to do it alone or as a team. If you do it as a team, you run a 5K and do 2 obstacles. You can check it out at: http://www.menshealthurbanathlon.com/

I first heard about this at the gym where I work out.  I jumped on the Internet to check it out. I was immediately intrigued, however I thought there is no way I can do this. The next day a friend of mine posted something on facebook that she was thinking about doing it. I responded that I was thinking about it also and we decided to form a team. We still needed one more team member. We spoke to the gym owner and she found us someone that wanted to join us.

Once I committed, I began to get nervous. I am a very impulsive person and I tend to sign up for things before I really think about it. So I am now committed and realize I am in no way in shape for this type of race. I have been working out regularly for about a year and a half, but I am not in that good of shape.  Luckily, the gym has about 10 teams signed up, so they are having special training classes just for us. We begin our official training on July 31st. In the meantime, we have an assignment. We are to run every other day for 20 minutes. We start with a warmup, then run 1 min, walk 1.5, minutes, and continue for 20 min. Each day we are to increase the amount of running time. I started doing this on Thursday of last week and I have not been able to increase the time yet. The trainer told me that she would like us to all be on a relatively equal playing field. I am really beginning to worry that I won't be ready.