Add me to the long list of people passing this link along - Cool Running :: The Couch-to-5K Running Plan. I started several months ago, with occasional lapses. But yesterday, I actually ran my first 5K race. My goals were simple:

  1. Finish the race
  2. Running the whole way
  3. Ahead of the walkers
  4. And those who injured themselves during this particular race.

Mission(s) accomplished.

Goal for the next one: finish my 5K more than 1 minute ahead of the winning 10K runner.

Anyway, the plan works. Well. And that’s from a guy who hasn’t run since the mid 80’s.

Being a huge geek, I of course had a bunch of Perl scripts, during the training phase, that would break up a Podcast at the appropriate intervals, inserting the words “walk”, “run”, “finished”, etc. Nice when running at night, not having to stop and check the watch or the iRiver’s timer to see how long the current leg had to go…

Update: I finally got around to packaging up the script as promised. It can be found in all it’s only-ever-intended-to-be-used-by-it’s-author glory right here.