Adventures in Walking From the Couch to 5K - Chapter 23

AJ arrives home after her successful completion of her first 5K walk. She parks her truck in the garage and goes inside. She lays her stuff down on the kitchen table. AJ’s legs are feeling heavy like soaked bath towels after the ride home and sitting down in the celebration tent.

She goes into the living room and starts to do her exercises that she had been doing during her training. AJ starts out on the floor and lays back to do the supine spinal twist and lays there and falls asleep for 30 minutes. She opens her eyes, looks around, chuckles out loud and says to herself I can’t believe I laid down to stretch and fell asleep.

Pulling her knees up to her chest and then rocking up to a seated position with her legs crossed, AJ sits up. After a couple of minutes she puts her hands down on the floor in front of her, props herself up on her hands and uncrosses her legs to get into a position of being on her hands and knees. She jumps her feet back to have her legs out in a plank position, slowly she walks her hands back to be in a downward dog position. AJ keeps walking her hands back to where she is in a forward fold and vertebrae by vertebrae stands up.

I am impressed I got up off the floor without falling over, AJ smiles, chuckles and heads upstairs for a very well deserved hot tub time. I can’t believe how hard these stairs are. She thinks to herself. When I get to the top of the stairs I get my reward of a nice hot tub. AJ arrives at the top of the stairs and gives a huge sigh of relief that she has made it.

Walking into her room she just drops all of her clothes on her way to the hot tub that is in her bathroom. In the bathroom she turns on the light over the hot tub, pushes a button to retract the hot tub cover and pushes another button that gets the jets going full blast. The next button brings up a 24-inch television screen, AJ nods and thinks to herself I am glad I paid extra for that. The television is already set to the Hallmark Channel.

The movie playing on the television is one of AJ’s favorites, Christmas Lodge. AJ slides into the hot tub to enjoy the movie, the bubbly hot water and some well deserved alone time.

Hot tub time comes to an end when the movie ends. AJ pulls herself up out of the hot tub by putting her hands up on the side and places her feet one at a time on the step on the inside, turns and sits on the side so that she can pull legs up and swing them around to put her feet on the purple rug and stand up. Her purple robe that she grabs and puts on is sitting on the stand by the hot tub. Before leaving the bathroom she presses the buttons that turn off the jets, puts the television away and moves the cover back into place.

As she walks through her bedroom she picks up her planner, a pen and her laptop and walks down the stairs to relax on the couch. Sitting on the couch, she puts the footrest up, has her laptop on her lap, her planner and pen are on the big puffy arm rest. AJ sighs while thinking what a great morning. I finished my first 5K. My boys were at the finish line. I met some great friends. Do I do the fall 10K? On that note, she turns on her laptop, clicks on the browser, clicks on runmichigan.com and starts searching for her next 5K race. AJ checks the races on the website calendar with her planner. She picks out one race a month, registers online for it and puts it in her planner. Included in her races is the 10K that is in October.

AJ sets her laptop aside and goes out to the kitchen to get herself a nice big glass of strawberry flavored water and ice cubes. While she is in the kitchen she also picks up some peanut butter crackers and takes them back to her spot on the couch.

It’s time to sit and enjoy having such a great accomplishment. She has her next races scheduled and is going to continue walking for 45 minutes on 3 days a week and doing her stretching exercises every day.

Before being able to relax though she sets her laptop back on her lap and sends an email off to her group thanking them for all of their encouragement for this training program. AJ also writes in her email that she will join them all for walking. Clicking the send button, she sets the laptop on the couch, leans back on the reclining couch with the footrest still up and takes a well-deserved nap.

The end!