Walking a 5K? I think I could do that

I got invited to take part in a 5K in June.

It’s a fundraiser for the school where my exercise class instructor works, but even though I like her a lot, I doubt I would have done it until she said the magic words.

“You can walk.”

While you won’t be seeing me doing any Couch to 5K program, walking could work. There’s just one little concern. I have to convince myself that I can walk 3.1 miles.

I don’t like running for running’s sake.

I’d run like crazy to beat out a play at first base, pursue a volleyball or chase down a pickleball now, and I’ll certainly take off if someone’s chasing me, but running just to run? No thanks.

Running was the thing I had to do either before or while I was doing what I wanted — suicides at the start of basketball season, a couple miles around the neighborhood at the end of baseball practice, cross country in gym instead of games.

Plus it hurt and left me out of breath.

But I love riding my bike (and should do it more often), plus I take walks with my wife all the time when the weather’s good, and we walk all the time on vacation. She even said she might be willing to do the 5K with me.

It’s in early June, so spring may have even arrived by then.

So while you won’t be seeing me doing any Couch to 5K program, walking could work. There’s just one little concern.

I have to convince myself that I can walk 3.1 miles.

It should be easy, and not just because I’m in better shape than I have been in years.

As I said, we walk everywhere on vacation, but I’ll need to treat it more like walking 2 1/2 miles on the High Line to the Whitney, and then back to our hotel, on a day where we probably walked 10 miles.

Sure, it wasn’t all at once, but I didn’t feel any the worse for wear through any of it.

But I need to make sure it’s not like San Francisco, where everything seemed a lot farther than it should have been, and a pre-dinner walk to Berkeley Marina felt like a march to nowhere.

Plus I hurt almost all of it from my heels to my hips, although that was a shoe problem that I think we figured out.

Although I’ve had friends run the Boston Marathon, this definitely won’t be the first step toward 26.2 miles down the road. I respect people who can, especially if they’re not trained runners, but there’s no way I could ever do that.

But a couple hours on a Sunday for a good cause? Yeah, I might be able to do that.

If I were in that group of runners in the photo above from Pixabay, I’d be the guy walking in the back.

UPDATE!!! — I now have a fundraising page, if you want to donate.

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