In middle school and high school, my parents would write me a note so I wouldn’t have to run the mile. There was no reason why I should have gotten out of doing it. I didn’t have asthma. Sometimes I was chubby and sometimes not, but nothing unusual. I was just not athletically ambitious, and was the sort picked last in gym class. So I never ran a mile. I walked lots of miles. I walked 2 miles each way to high school every day. But I never ran.
Today, 14 years after graduating from high school, slightly overweight but fairly active (I lift weights and bicycle several miles each way to work), I ran 2 miles without stopping. Other than for lights, of which there weren’t many. I mapped out the route on google maps (someone asked: you pick an address that’s about 1 mile away from your house, and then add a destination back to your house and then move around the lines until you like the route), ran 5 minutes warm-up (I had to move my car anyhow because of complicated parking rules), and then ran 2 miles while listening to an old podcast of This American Life. I didn’t stop so I could mark it off as done, and now that I’ve done it I’m glad. It wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t bad either and now I feel accomplished.
I have no idea how long it took and I don’t care!
While I was doing it, I wasn’t sure if I would ever do it again, but now that I’ve done it, I think I would like to try again. But next time for 5 km.