A Momentous Day

(Thanks, Google Earth! We were able to measure the route of my 20-min. run and then add my warm-up and cool down to it . . . so here's a photo of my path!)

I did it. I ran 20 minutes straight this morning. Twice on my curvy path of my run, I ran into my best friend, who was also doing her C25k run (she's on an earlier week), and she ran with me for a minute each time. That was good because talking to her (and realizing I could talk while running my 11th and 15th minutes) was good support for me to keep going.

TWENTY MINUTES! And I could have run 21, possibly more. I can't say it was fun, exactly, but it gave me a feeling of accomplishment. And it was/is really cool to the feel of my muscles shifting into different gears for uphill and downhill run. It's fun in the same way it's fun to admire how your car engine feels shifting from one gear to the next. (Cleary, I am a total nerd in this way (among many other ways), but that's perfectly okay. I love driving a stick shift.) I love feeling how things tie together.

At the end of my run, when the beep to stop surprised me because I thought I had 1-2 minutes more, I was thinking of what's next. A fire truck went by with its siren screaming, and I thought about joining a volunteer fire department some day. I thought about being in good enough shape for something like that to be a possibility. Then I thought:

I can never again let myself get out of the habit of engaging the physical side of me.

As a person who tends to be very intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally based, those are the elements of myself that I engage most often in my life: in choosing my work, in getting impassioned, etc. But there is a physical element to me that is interconnected with those other elements, and when I remember that and give the physical part of me reign sometimes, I am a happier, healthier, more successful person.

Week 6, Day 1 will mean going back to alternating running and walking before committing to only running from then on. I am so excited now to know that I really can do it!