Some friendly husband-and-wife competition and the support of the Wellness Center staff are two things that got Lynn and Rich Rumba calling themselves runners for the first time in their lives. In June, the couple joined a Wellness Center team doing the Couch-to-5K, a 9-week training program organized by Dan Levesque and designed to get first-time runners ready to try a 5K.
“We are not runners,” Lynn asserted a week ahead of the planned event in Manchester, the Cigna/Elliot 5K on August 12. Their goal for the Cigna/Elliot 5K in Manchester on August 12 was just to finish without having to stop and walk.
And finish they did, running the whole way at a pace of about 1 mile in 13 minutes. They were thrilled.
Rick & Lynne Rumba
Lynn has a bad knee, the result of a hiking incident, while Rick hasn’t run in 40 years. Still, they both had been exercising regularly at the Wellness Center after joining at the turn of the year. Rick says he came four times a week and really loved the Expresso bicycling machines. When the posters went up for the 5K training, he figured he’d try it, but that Lynn would sit it out because of the knee.
“She hasn’t run so much as from here to the car in the time I’ve known her,” he said. But, their daughter had done the 5K training program last year and had a great experience with it, so they both signed on.
Rick says the training program was just like reading a recipe out of a cookbook—follow the steps and you’ll get there. Only he and Lynn weren’t 100 percent convinced it would work for them. A week before the event, Lynn was suggesting she’d be the last one across the finish line. Both are now 56 years old and celebrating their 36th wedding anniversary this year.
Lynn’s knee is stronger now. Rick, who has asthma and Type 1 diabetes, reports both those conditions are vastly improved. His sugar levels seem stable and he believes the slow, incremental steps in the training program ensured he didn’t have trouble with his breathing along the way. “I felt very little of the old tightness,” Rick said.
He says his glucose numbers are the best they’ve ever been since he started exercising in January.
And not only is Lynn’s knee stronger, but she says she feels stronger all over. “I feel that my legs and hips, joints and ankles all feel better and I’m just paying attention to it all.”
Lynn admits that when she began the training back in June, she was so self conscious about it that she jumped at the chance to use a treadmill in the cardio rehab room where fewer people would see her.
In the C25K training program, the first sessions have the runners doing intervals–running 60 seconds and walking for 90 seconds, for example. Those intervals ratchet slowly upward, the idea being to get your body and lungs used to it and building stamina. “I remember the first time—run 60 and walk 90—and thinking ‘Oh, God, we have to run 60 seconds?!’,” Lynne said.
A week before the C25K event in Manchester, the Rumbas were out for their usual training run on the streets of Peterborough. Lynn was behind Rich most of the way and he wondered if she would make it. Soon she passed him and finished the route one-quarter mile ahead of him. If Rick reported doing 10 laps at the high school track, Lynne set out the next day and outdid him.
“It’s competition, but it’s more that we’re supporting each other,” Lynn says. “I think by us doing it together, we really supported each other and egged each other on.”
The competitive edge wasn’t the only benefit to doing this as a couple. “We’d talk it through all the time–when was the best time to go out and do the training runs—things like that.”
After the event, the Rumbas said they would continue with their running and exercise programs and would have liked to have taken on the next challenge—the Bridge to 10K event held October 10—but their schedules would not allow it.
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