Twenty-six minutes later I feel great

Running is really interesting. I can't stand it right before I run and always try to make excuses not to. But once I finish I feel awesome. That was the case last night.

I had to sort of abandon Couch 2 5K this week. It isn't that I'm giving up. I've just had trouble maintaining their schedule due to my schedule. And with time running out until the Spa 5K, I need to pick up the pace (literally).

So instead of doing the interval running and walking I moved a couple of steps ahead. It said I should run for 22 minutes. You might remember that I ran for 20 minutes last Saturday. I didn't think 2 more minutes was enough of an increase. So I set out to run 25.

I went after a pretty bad day at work. I just haven't felt good about myself. And the running was difficult at first. But I kept pushing through it. And each time my two-minute interval timer went off, I felt a little better. Six, eight, 10, 12 minutes and I was doing good. I was trying to compute how long it would take me to run the 5K.

I kept going. Fourteen, 16, 18, 20, 22 minutes. I felt a million times better than last Saturday when I struggled to finish the 20. At 24 minutes I knew I was getting close. I felt so good that I forgot that I wouldn't get a notice when I reached 25. At one point I was thinking, man, this is a long minute. I looked down at the timer and it said 25:46. Whoa!. So I finished that 26th minute before walking it out.

I remember a few weeks ago when I could barely run for 90 seconds. Now I just ran for 26 minutes. I'm going to increase by about 4-6 minutes each time from here until the race. That means 30 minutes on Saturday and 36 minutes next Wednesday. That would put me at doing 45-46 minutes the Wednesday before the race. I still think I can do the race in less than 50 minutes. We'll see.