At the beginning of last month, I wrote about being in the early days of the Couch to 5K running program. And this morning, I finished!

I really didn’t think I’d finish. Athletics and I have never mixed. But as I wrote in the other entry, I found a surprising appeal about running – the outdoors, the solitude, the time to think and to catch up on podcasts (something I stopped doing when I no longer had to commute to work).

Even though I’ve finished, I’m hesitant to call myself a runner. I still find it mostly difficult. I don’t think my form’s all that good, I’m probably not “fueling” my runs as well as I could be, and my legs and my lungs disagree about how quickly I can run. I see other runners flying by me on the street and I still think I’ll never be like them. I read running blogs and feel like I need a Runner to Average Person dictionary.

But on the other hand, I have come a long way since the day running five minutes nonstop was a triumph. I won’t be running 5K races anytime soon, but now I have a good framework to improve within. I run to discover new areas of my neighbourhood, to spend some time working over certain thoughts, to listen to podcasts that make me laugh to myself in the middle of the street. Those are the things that keep me going, rather than the invented pressure to be a certain kind of runner.

I’m going to take a few days’ break from running, think about what I want to do next. It’ll be interesting to see how I approach running now that there’s no longer a set schedule I have to stick to, when it’s just me and my moods and whims.

And now that the C25K program is officially complete, it seems a good time to ease back into the other, similar structure of daily writing, too!

++

There’s a new entry up at Lumisilla mailla.