For those of you who don’t know, I’m trainging to run my first race, a 10k in the Blue Nose Marathon in May and I’ve been fortunate enough to have been asked to train with an amazing group of people called Team Myles.

Over the past few years I’ve written a few posts about my struggles with running and it was because of the struggles that I’ve had with running that I jumped at the opportunity to train with Team Myles this year when it was offered to me.

Last summer I was trying to train for my first Blue Nose Marathon when I realized I couldn’t run more than 3.5km due to pain. It was extremely disheartening because I’m very competitive and hate not being able to finish something that I’ve started. I’m the type of person who likes to set goals for myself and make sure they are seen through to the end.

In August of 2010 I was able to do my first 5k… sort of. I ran for the first 1.5 km straight without stopping but then I had to start doing 1 minute of running and 30 seconds of walking to finish it out. Yes, I completed 5km, but to me it never actually counted because I didn’t run the whole 5km, I walked parts of it.

Fast forward to February 9, 2011 and to my training with Team Myles. We’ve been training with Kris and Devon from Push Fitness for a few weeks and training had been going well. I was having some hip and back pain here and there but I was making progress and I was happy.

February 9 was a Wednesday night run and at this point in our training we were doing 3 laps around the Halifax Commons. I had done our previous 4.15km (3 laps) run without a partner and was making progress but I was still at the point where I had to walk every so often because I wasn’t pacing myself enough. Because of this I decided to change it up and run with Sheila as my partner to try and pace myself a little better.

We had only been training for about a month as a group and everyone on Team Myles was still getting to know each other and I figured this would be a good way to get to know someone else on the team and try a training method I had never done before. Little did I realize that running with someone as stubborn as I am would help me push myself farther than I ever had before…

Just before finishing our 3 laps, without walking once, Kris told us that if we went another half loop we’d hit 5km. I looked at Sheila and told her I’d never run 5km before and that I wanted to do it. In quickly learning the personality type she was in the 25 minute run we had just done, I knew she’d come right along with me and she did.

We finished our first 5k together in 00:30:25 and it was one of the highlights of my training so far. The great thing is that two others, Brad MacLeod and Peter Harrison both finished their first 5ks as well just a few minutes behind us. There were a lot of high-fives going on and as winded and tired as we were, you could see how proud each of us was!

The Team Myles program is an amazing program and I’m proud to be a part of it as well as one of the volunteers leading it! The comradery and support that goes on between us as a group on our runs and via email is nothing more than spectacular. I signed up for the Blue Nose Marathon hoping to be able to do the 5k and here I am running 5k already. I’ve now bumped my goal up to the 10k and if all goes right with my training, I want to do it in under an hour.