10k Training

We were supposed to start our training sessions for the 10K Sun Run last week.  Unfortunately the snow ended up causing it to be cancelled, so now we are starting a week late.  Meredith and I did go out last Saturday, when the road had finally cleared off enough, and we tried out the first session.  And it seemed pretty easy.  I do hate to run, but we start out so slow, with our shuffle of a run, that I'm sure that we are moving faster when we are doing the walking part.
This week we do repeats of 'shuffling' one minute, and then walking for two minutes, with a five minute warm up and cool down at each end.  This past Monday was the first official training session.  Our group of 'learn to runners', which consists of about 25 or so, all went out together.  The first session was 34 minutes, and then we did a bunch of stretching at the end.  We are out in the dark, so we have to be pretty conscious of the traffic.  The group leaders are all wearing bibs with reflective stripes on them, and then the rest of us are wearing whatever reflective stuff that we have.  There was some packed snow still in spots on the sidewalks, and the sky had cleared and some of the bare pavement was icy.  Everyone made it back safely though, and it seemed relatively easy.
 We have a group session every Monday night, and then we have to do two more each week on our own.  Tonight Meredith came over and we went out together, again in the dark, and by that point it had started to rain.  We just ran on what we thought was going to be a quiet street in front of our place, but there were still more cars than we expected going by.  No sidewalks and still snowbanks down each side of the road.  I wore a reflective safety vest and Meredith had reflective wrist bands and a head lamp.  Guess it doesn't help when you chose to run at the same time that people are getting home from work.  Most of the time we were able to step over the snow piles and get well off the road. Thank goodness the rain was only light.  Not like yesterday when it was one dark miserable wet day, and we walked the dogs on the dyke in the pelting rain.  Hopefully we can do our next session on Saturday in the daylight.