Wednesday, October 10, 2007

The full 30 minutes...

I've been working on getting my mile run time down, but this week I was thinking about my goals and I realized that I need to really work on endurance more than speed.

For me, its more important that I can run as long as I need to instead of being a sprinter and going in short fast bursts. Not that I'm anywhere close to being a sprinter, but I was thinking futuristically and decided that I wanted to be an endurance runner and not a sprinter.

So, I changed my routine and today I ran a full 30 minutes WITHOUT stopping. This is huge.

At 5 minutes I checked my watch...gaaah...25 to go!

At 10 minutes I peaked over the tough part...mostly because I had the perfect song to run to...

At 15 minutes I thought...this is what I would normally stop at...maybe I'll just go another 2 minutes and then I'll have "improved."

At 17 minutes I thought, "I can make it to 20 minutes..only 3 more to go."

At 20 minutes I stopped watching the time and turned the treadmill to distance to see how far I could go and told myself that I would run until it read 1.5 miles then I could stop.

At 25 minutes I reached 1.5 miles and thought to myself...I've got to go the last 5 minutes.

At 28 minutes I knew I wouldn't stop until the calories lost read 300 no matter what the time read and wouldn't you know it...at 30 minutes it all came together.

Three months ago I could have NEVER done that. I would have flopped on the floor after 5 minutes and been depressed at how out of shape I was.

I'm proud of myself today. I'm proud of how far I've come and today I can actually see the finish line and it doesn't look too far away or too hard to get there.

Today I ran the full 30 minutes.

2 comments:

The Hansen Family said...

Congratulations Anna! You are way more in shape than I am, that's for sure! Keep it up and pretty soon you'll be running marathons!

~Emma

Anonymous said...

SIGH--I remember that exhilarating feeling, discovering that normal people CAN run for long periods of time! I only wish I had learned this sooner . . . .