Eluding Tuonela

After almost a full week of running in pouring rain and questioning my life choices, I joined for my first ever group run in the neighboring town of Kaarina. Met some really nice people and ended up running two 10k loops instead of planned one in a wonderfully sunny and warm August morning. It was super nice to talk about running with some marathon experts, and get their advice on things. I was also impressed with myself of keeping up with the faster pace group who ran ~6 min kilometers almost the whole 21k. I probably could've pushed on the last couple of clicks, too, but decided against it because I wanted not to be totally dead tomorrow for my first pool swimming session in about two decades!

I fully expect not to be able to swim properly even 50 meters. It's going to be a long journey to 5k. The local training group site advised against joining the group training sessions before being able to swim at least 500m with moderate effort. The tentative plan is to use the remainder of the year to get in shape for signing up with the training group in early January when the new season starts. Four months should be ample time to learn the very basics I need.

I'm slowly starting to grasp the real beauty of my journey so far from January to here. It's been 235 days of sweat, tears, pain, and an amazing amount of endorphins and happiness. I wish I would've documented it better early on. And I wish I could encourage more people to challenge themselves.

Right now I'm pretty excited about tomorrow; I got a date with myself at the local swimming pool at 6am!