20 Minutes

25 Seconds? 25 seconds left! I did it!

My brain jolted in shock and surprise, giving a peppy little bounce to my last few jogging steps as the timer ran down. For the first time in my life I had just run for 20 minutes straight without stopping!

For all you runners out there, I know what you're thinking. "Whoopdeedoo, a whole 20 minutes. I run, like, twice that every day."  But, people, this is for real exciting for me!

I've spend a lot of my life wishing that I could be a runner. In middle school when the state used to make us do our "fitness test" which involved running a mile, I was always one of the slow, chubby kids at the back of the pack that ran for about half a lap before giving up (by the way Connecticut, forcing kids to randomly run a mile once a year doesn't actually have anything to do with making them healthier. It's mostly just embarrassing.) As I got older, and actually found I liked working out, I still never quite took to running. It was hard, and I felt like I was nailed to the pavement everytime I tried to run. I stuck to speed walking, aerobics (maybe that's where I got my affinity for shiny leotards. . .{kidding!}), and late night dance parties in my apartment. . .if those count.

Still every time I'm outside on a brisk walk and some athletically blessed person blasts by me, I can't help staring at them wistfully. Longing to be them: hair streaming in the wind, pounding around on toned calves.

I've heard rumblings about The Couch to 5K running program for awhile now, and when a friend was looking for a training program a few months ago, I suggested it to her. Every day at work, I'd hear about how miraculous the program was. She was running!

Enter me and my competitve self deciding I was going to try it too! About 6 weeks ago, I began the progam which involves interval training for 3, half hour workouts a week. Super easy, super short, and great because if one day I didn't get to it, or did some other exercise instead, I wasn't completely off the program!

my feet aren't really this disproportionate to my body. Awkward angle, I promise. 

Thus we arrive to the miracle of all miracles: Me. Running 20 whole minutes! It might not have been pretty, and I probably looked like one of those people you see barely moving on the side of the road and you wonder why they don't just stop and walk. Now I know, they probably don't because they're doing a running program and their stubborn streak refuses to let them. And now I'm one of them. A runner!