It's quite normal for me to go months without blogging and now I'm writing two posts in two days.
I wrote yesterday about how worried I was about doing 20 minutes of running without stopping. I felt a bit sick the whole day worrying about it and I was hoping and praying that my running partner wouldn't want to go out. When we did go out the warm up was awful, I'd been and done a gym class earlier in the day and I felt stiff and uncomfortable, and I was aware that we were walking much slower than we really needed to for an effective warm up. I was very tempted to turn around and walk home without even starting to run. Eventually we got to our normal starting point for running and I felt completely hopeless, there was no way I could possibly do 20 minutes constantly without stopping so there was no point in trying. I decided to run as slowly as I could to the mouth of the park on our normal running route, I'd done this before in a free practice and I know that this is about 10 minutes away. I'd also decided that I wouldn't check my watch until I got there. So I kept running, aiming for the mouth of the park but before I got there Laura on the C25K podcast said I was half way through. This confirmed that I was running surprisingly slowly. So I decided to keep on going to the mouth of the park, as I had originally planned. I checked my watch at this point and found I was 12 minutes and 30 seconds in heading in to the really difficult park going up hill over longish grass. I then decided to run through the grassy bit and then review. Part way through it said that I was 15 minutes in and only had 5 minutes left. This was the first point at which I acknowledged that I could actually complete this. I had a slight mishap at this point when I tried to go down the gully way out of the park but there were some people going the other way, running partner had already gone through so I got a bit stuck running up a path in completely the opposite direction to the one I needed to go, but I managed to run a small loop so I could keep going and the whole thing was quite a useful distraction. We ran up to our normal cooling down stretch and the app told me that we'd made it.
I don't think I ever really considered stopping. It was a fantastic experience, before I set out I was sure I couldn't do it but once I got started I quietly decided that I was going to do it and I did. I know that today was make or break, if I had stopped to walk it would have knocked my confidence and been the first time that I hadn't enjoyed running so I'm so pleased it worked out well. Now we get to graduate onto week six.
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