Nothing Like Being A Cheerleader

I got to be a part of something truly amazing yesterday.

As many of you know, my lovely bride has been doing the Couch-To-5K program for the past several weeks. She completed the course on Sunday, and her first-ever 5K is this weekend. In the meantime, we are working in a few runs to keep her in shape and ready to go for Saturday's race.

Since the start of the program, I've told her I believed she could complete the 5K in under 40 minutes. I guess I said this enough times that she accepted this as her goal.

On Sunday, Genople came oh so close to hitting that mark, going 3.09 in 40 minutes flat.

I was out of town Sunday, so I wasn't able to run with her. However, her text expressed her sentiment at narrowly missing her goal.

As you can tell, she wanted to break the 40-minute barrier.

When we set out for our run yesterday, I am not sure if my bride had in mind to reach her goal or not. My thinking was to run 3.1 miles and see what kind of time we could post.

Our plan was to start out walking for the first 1:30 as a warm up, run for 10 minutes, walk for 1:30, run 10 minutes, walk for 1:30 and run the rest of the way.

We started at 7:45 pm, and it was still a bit warm. Thankfully I had my handy-dandy water bottle with me to help keep us hydrated during the run. As we progressed, I noticed our pace kept picking up. Each mile seemed to be at a first pace.

At 19 minutes, we hit the 1.55-mark, the halfway point. When I told my bride we were on pace to finish in just under 39 minutes.

"Don't jinx us," was my bride's response.

There was no jinx on this day.

We kept picking up our pace with every lap around the track. I gave updates of how much farther to go once we got a half mile away from 3.1. Each tenth of the mile seemed to go by faster than the previous one until at last we had finished.

Final time: Thirty-seven minutes, fifty-two seconds.

My bride not only met her goal of a sub-40 minute time, she blew it out of the water.

Since I began running two years ago, I have been able to accomplish and achieve a number of things. I've ran six half marathons, one full marathon and even won my age group in a 5K. Yet, nothing has made me prouder than seeing my bride reach her goal.

While it's great to be the star on the field, it can be equally as rewarding to be the cheerleader on the sidelines.

Not going to lie. I can't wait to see how my bride does on Saturday. No matter what her time is, she's a winner in my book just lining up at the start line.

Happy running!