DONE! It really wasn't easy but I managed to run for the full 20 minutes without stopping.
When I first started, my legs were aching before I'd even got two minutes in so I knew it was going to be tough. I managed to keep going to the five minute mark and then I thought, 'Oh God, it's that awful rap song'. I'm the king, baaybee...
I suppose it's trying to motivate you in a 'you can't stop me' kind of way but it just makes me cross every time I hear it. This guy going on about being 'the king' and getting 'the finest girls'... can't say I identify with that too much, nope. I was having a little feminist rant in my head about how men can train up and do all this running to becoming the king, while women do it to become the 'finest girls' Although there is that female singer warbling over the top, so maybe she gets the finest girls, too... ANYWAY. It sort of helped having my little rant because it ate up some minutes and stopped my legs feeling like they were going to fall off!
Made it to halfway and turned back for home. It was drizzling the whole way along and the wind was against me which made things even tougher. I really wasn't going very fast at all but I kept trying to keep up a stream of things to think about to distract myself from how hard it was. Rachel and Phoebe from Friends running in Central Park... only that didn't help, because Phoebe runs in a really crazy way and the whole point is that Rachel is too uptight to run like that. But if you ask me, Rachel is the sensible one because it would take SO MUCH energy to run in the crazy arm-flailing way that Phoebe does...
I started getting tired again, so I had to imagine I was a superhero. Iron Man - no, Iron WOMAN, with lightweight armour so it doesn't weigh me down ;). This is how delirious I was from all the running and the rain and the sweat and the blurry eyes and the gunk in my throat. But I still made it! I got to the end and didn't overshoot this time (ha! no chance of that at my pace). So that's twenty whole minutes of running under my belt. I ran into my friend on the way back and he stuck his tongue out at me when I told him because he'd pretty much just got out of bed...
On to week six next!