For anybody who sits in front of a computer all day, it’s important to get exercise during non-work hours. With that said, I’ve done very little to make working out a critical part of my week. If anything even remotely requires attention, exercise is the first thing to get dropped.

When I do have time to exercise, I generally prefer going for a run through our beautiful neighborhood or tossing my mountain bike in the back of the truck and heading over to the nearby trails at Harbison State Forrest. I’ve never competed in either of those arenas, but I’ve been slowly building up my endurance and can now run about 4 miles. I’m rather proud of that accomplishment, but the idea of running 6.2 miles (10K) by the end of March sounds like a big challenge. One that I’ll start training for this week.

How did that happen? Well a bunch of our friends from the University of South Carolina have been talking about participating in the Cooper River Bridge 10K (bridgerun.com) in Charleston, SC on March 21, 2007. Some planned to walk and some planned to run. I wasn’t planning to do either, but yesterday Amy’s friend Adriana said she would walk it if Amy signed up, and Amy said she would go if I would run it…and if Amy wants me to do it, then I’ll certainly give it my best effort. So here I am, a novice runner, trying to figure out how to train for a 10K. I don’t plan to really compete with anyone there, but as a personal goal, I’d like to be able to run the whole thing. One of our friends recommended Hal Higdon’s 10K novice training program. Fortunately, it’s an 8 week program and there’s just enough weeks before the race for me to go through the entire thing. I plan to push each day back so that the weeks start with Sunday and end with Saturday, since that’s the race day. In an unrelated turn of events, I also just ordered my first “real” mountain bike last weekend: A 19” Gary Fisher Piranha from Harrell’s Bicycle World. I’ve been talking about getting a decent bike since before we moved to South Carolina, and after a lot of research and test rides, the Piranha seemed like the best bang for my buck. I’ll probably post more about the new bike after I’ve ridden it a few times, but you can bet that on my cross training days I’ll be tearin’ up the trails.

Anybody have any advice for this first time 10K runner and novice mountain biker?