Running for Grammy - Kew Gardens 10k

Last Sunday, Luke and I ran our first race - a 10k at Kew Gardens. I sort of took up running while we were living in Scotland but pretty much stopped after we moved to Cambridge.  At the beginning of the summer, I decided it was time to pick it up again and asked Luke if he'd run with me.  He said yes but told me that he needed a goal.  So I went online and started looking for races that we could participate in.  The Kew Gardens 10k met what we needed.  It was about 3 months away which would give us adequate time to train, it was relatively close and 10k seemed like a good starting race with a little bit of challenge mixed in.

My grammy has Alzheimer's and I've known that if I were to run a race that it would be to raise money for Alzheimer's for a long time.  And so we signed up with the Alzheimer's Society.  You can read our story on my fundraising page: https://www.justgiving.com/Aubree-Wisley/.  We even got cool running tops.  And I didn't think about it when I was ironing on our names, but it was so nice because the volunteers could cheer us on by name as we passed by.  It's the little things, right?

We used the Women's Health 10k Training Plan and were able to stick pretty close to the schedule.  Our time scale was a bit longer than this one so we repeated the middle weeks a couple times.

Because the race started early on Sunday, we went down to London on Saturday afternoon and rented a room via Airbnb in Chiswick.  We really liked the area and hope to go back and explore more.

We woke up early on Sunday and walked to the tube station to go the three stops to Kew Gardens.  You can see our sleepy faces in the picture above.

The day was beautiful - perfect running weather.  Blue skies, cool start to the day.

Kew Gardens was also great because it the scenery was beautiful. For some reason the view makes a huge difference when we're running.

Somehow we started off near the front of the hundreds of other runners.  That didn't last long though.  How someone runs at that pace for 6.2 miles I will never understand.  Oh well.

My goal was to run it in under an hour.  And we did!  53 minutes 16 seconds.

And the feeling you have when you finish is amazing!  Totally wasn't expecting that.

At the end of the race, we picked up all of our post race treats - which included your standard British post-race necessity:

However, we opted for ice cream as it was still only 10am.  The beer made a great accompaniment to our dinner that evening.

Overall, we really enjoyed the experience and would like to do another race in the near future.  I'll keep you updated.

There is still time to donate if you'd like.  Just click on the link: https://www.justgiving.com/Aubree-Wisley/.  And it doesn't matter which side of the pond you are on.  They've figured all that out for you already.

Love & miss you,
Aubs, Luke & Luther