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Updated 52 Days ago
Getting Ready for a 5K: Run For Congo Women is Only 3 Weeks Away
I live on the opposite side of the running shoe isle from Audrey, my marathon running office mate, as a pretty sedate person who buys athletic shoes based on color. I run to answer the phone, I run if my car may is being towed for illegally parking, and I run into the store when it is raining outside. If you are looking for advice on improving your running skills I apologize, your not going to find it in this story, if you are wondering how to get someone like me running for something besides the ice cream truck - well, you have come to the right place.
With the cool weather on our side and a desire for cute running shoes as motivation, right now is a great time to undertake the challenge to participate in Women for Women International's "Run for Congo Women" on October 18th at Queeny Park. Proceeds from the event will benefit Congalese women whose lives have been impacted by war.
Kent Bohling, the owner of The Running Center of St. Louis, gave me a rundown of how someone like me should prepare run a 5K in just three weeks (after he got over the fact that I actually thought I could run a 5K after only 3 weeks of training). First things first, he told me, "You could walk it." And since this event is a walk/run I asked his expert advce on how to prepare for walking the 5K. Kent says a solid goal would be:
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Week 1 - Kent says "Don't worry about distance."
- Walk 20 minutes, 4 days a week
- Week 2 - "Jump it up to 30-40 minutes."
- Walk 30-40 minutes, 4 days a week
- Week 3 - If you are "feeling better and feeling stronger you will naturally walk more or less quicker."
- 50 minutes of moving, 4 days a week
- According to Kent this week may be good time to start integrating some slow running or jogging into your plan. He recommends starting by walking for 5 minutes and jogging for 1 minute, repeating the walk and run cycle until you are finished with your 50 minutes. From there you can build up week by week, adding minutes or distance to your running spurt as you go.
So why can't I just start training to run 5K in three weeks (asked with a pouty lip and single stomp)? Kent says your tendons need training in order to "catch up to the muscles. That is why it is best to slowly implement a 10% increase [in time or distance] each week. It allows your connective tissue to catch up." So with three weeks to go it is best to focus on training your body to be able go from sedentary to being on its feet. It typically takes about an hour or less to walk a 5K course, so training to walk the event doesn't sound all that ridiculous now, does it?
The Women for Women International "Run for Congo Women" benefits Congolese women survivors of war. The run is hosted all over the country and will be in St. Louis October 18th. You can register for the 5K/10K run/walk by visiting the run's website. If you have already mastered the craft of walking (unlike me on so many different levels) and you are ready to kick some runner butt, you can check out Audrey's post with racing tips and St. Louis running events.
About The Author:
Got a story you want to share, or just need someone to talk to? Email Me! melody@toastedrav.comI have a penchant for pizza, a love of books, and a strong cup of coffee always makes me smile. When I'm not writing for ToastedRav I like long walks on concrete sidewalks, hanging-lamp lit dinners, and a good bottle of Shiraz.
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I, sadly, will not be participating. I walk the line, jog my memory, and run out for cigarettes. Wonder if Kent has any suggestions for a program for me (other than a 12-step one!).
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.