Twenty

There's a lot you can do in twenty minutes.

I can walk most of the way to work. You can have a decent catching-up conversation with a friend. You can get about a tenth of the way through the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. You can watch an episode of something on netflix, if you cut out the intro and the end credits. You can cook spaghetti. You can try to take a catnap.

I ran. For twenty minutes. 1.5 miles, approximately. Without stopping.

My speed fluctuated - my legs were protesting, hard, like they were a little last week, so I bounced a bit from 4.0-4.5, so I know, I'm still such a beginner.

But twenty minutes.

Twenty. Minutes.

I knew today I was going to try to up to twenty, because once I master being able to run twenty, that's when I'm going to stop focusing on increasing time and start focusing on increasing speed. So this week on (hopefully) 4.5, then next week try to get it up to 5.0, and from there.

I've tried to start running before. First time, junior year of college, second semester. I think I got maybe up to...three minutes at a time? Maybe? With four-five months? And then when we were living in Spokane, for about three months in the spring before we moved, and I could only get up to 4 minutes and that killed me.

Twenty minutes. And I've been doing this for...two months?

This is insane.

All day today, because I knew what I was going to try to accomplish, I kept trying to get myself psyched up - I even planned out how I was going to start this blog post, and tried to think of all the things that twenty minutes means. And I got to the gym after work, and I just wasn't feeling it. I seriously wanted to go straight home. I was tired, I have so much on my mind, but I'm in a groove now, of working out, and I didn't want to sacrifice that and start a precedent of "well, I can skip, just for today," because that is DANGEROUS territory. And I got on the treadmill and I started my running playlist and it just...no. I mentally talked myself through five minutes, and told myself that at ten minutes, at least ten minutes, I coudl think about taking a break, maybe run ten/walk one/run ten, but that felt like such a step backwards, and I've worked so hard.

And then, at ten minutes, something incredible happened. I realized I was halfway there. My legs were killing, though my breathing was okay, but it was all downhill from here.

I talked myself into fifteen minutes. At fifteen minutes and one second, I told myself I was farther than I'd ever been. And I had less than five minutes left. And I had to do this. I had to. I had to prove that I could.

Because this isn't something I've ever thought that I could do.

Twenty minutes. Of solid running. Nonstop. Working past sweat, working past leg soreness, working past mental blocks.

I completely give credit to 1) my running training schedule that I hijacked off the internet - having goals not only gave me something to work towards, but it also told me that because this was a training plan, these were goals that I should be able to meet, and it sort of became a self fulfilling prophecy. But also, 2), being in a gym, on a treadmill, where I could control my speed so I didn't burn myself out too quickly, which I think was 98% my problem in Spokane. Yeah, I was going really slow. But I also freaking did it.

Tonight has been beyond frustrating. My computer has been having problems since Friday, and I've been trying off and on to fix it and to get help online, but just nothing is working. My CD burner/reader wasn't talking to my computer, and whenever I try to try to turn the damn thing on, unless I manually reboot, it simply won't turn on. I spent what felt like most of my night trying to get the damn thing fixed, and all I have out of it is that my damn iTunes won't freaking work anymore either, and my attempts to reinstall are...for some reason, not working. I'm leaving for Thanksgiving family time Wednesday morning and I have way too much on the brain to get ready to be comfortable wasting an entire evening on this nonsense. And since my future goals right now are kind of based around going to college for computers and because whenever I tell people I want to do that they kind of assume I already know a bit about computers because why else would I do this and I'm bad at coping with not being able to do things, it's raising my stress levels quite a bit more than they should be.

I do need to remember, though. Twenty minutes. I did that. I accomplished that much, at least.