1.5 miles, baby.

Yes, friends. I have reached the 1.5 mile-milestone.

Back in the day, this would have been a feat. One day in high school, I went to the park because I decided I would be a runner. It seemed easy enough. I ran all the time. I ran out of class to get to the front of the lunch line. I chased the bus when I was late getting to my stop. This could totally be my sport.

One day I went to the park and ran. I didn't even make it to the .25 mile marker.

To make my long running history short, let's just say I'm a slow runner. Mayhaps you'd call me a jogger.

Two weeks ago I was talking about running with two of my Sunday school students who are very fast cross country runners. I told them that I did a half marathon back in December.

Student: What was your time?

Kathy: Um... I think it was 2:22:something.

Student: You know people can run full marathons under that time.

Kathy: [crying internal tears of shame]

 It's three months after the longest run I've ever accomplished and I'm starting from scratch again. As much as I'd like to make myself sound like this incredible endurance runner, 1.5 miles was hard today. But I did it. And I will do it again some time this week... maybe.

Now that it's starting to warm up outside, and I can be motivated to shave my legs again, it's time to gear up for 5k season. For those of you who are doing the same, here are some online tools that I've enjoyed using.

I know you can easily just keep track of your progress on your own calendar, but for some reason I like to use Active Trainer to log all of my workouts. You can log everything from exercise biking to hiking. It's great to be able to see how much you can accomplish over a month's period of time. But really, I like it because it automatically calculates my pace if I just put in my time and distance. Yes, I'm that bad at math. I swear I don't know how I look so Asian.

Cool Running has a Couch to 5k training plan that just takes 2 months to get you to being a regular 5k runner. Also, I use it to diagnose all my aches and pain when Webmd is too vague.

My first 5k that I hope to run is the Mississippi River Bridge Run on April 10th. That was my first 5k ever that I ran last year, and it's tough because it's uphill for the first half. But the scenery and the site of hundreds of people running up the on-ramp was unforgettable.

Sorry, this is all I have to offer. I lost the files of my mental pictures.

On a completely unrelated topic... Today, my mother asked me to show her how to get on to Faceplace. If case you didn't already know, my mom is a fob.