I DID IT!

Yesterday was my first real "long" run of the C25K training program: a five-minute warm-up walk followed by twenty minutes of running and a five-minute cool down. I was gearing up to go, lacing up my sneakers and stretching, all the while expressing my concerns about this run to Jeff.

"Twenty minutes? Just like that?" he asked. "It seems strange...just last week you were running for five minutes or three minutes. It just seems sudden."

On one hand I agreed with him. It does seem abrupt. My runs this week built in length, but a more natural progression would have been two ten-minute runs instead of one solid, long block like this.

However, I think the purpose of this method is to demonstrate to the runner that he/she is actually capable of running a longer stretch without stopping. As long as I didn't get a mental block ("What am I thinking? I can't do this!") and focused instead on how I was really feeling ("Hmmm. Not bad, actually.") I was fine.

That's right...I was fine! I did walk once, for about thirty seconds. But it was toward the end of my run and I was heading up a huge hill. The combination of fatigue and incline was too much. But I ran as soon as I got to the crest of the hill. And I tacked on another minute at the end to make up for it.

Sure, I was tired. It definitely felt like more running than I had done to that point. And today I'm really sore. But I ran twenty minutes (two miles)! With less than a month left before my first 5k, that's really encouraging.