More 5K angst

After a conversation yesterday with my friend Judy​, I realized that Judy and I are both using exactly the same fact to argue for opposite things. She said I can do a 5K; I said I can’t. Today, when I hit the 3.1 mile mark on the treadmill at 39 minutes, I thought to myself, “See? I can’t do it.”

So I’m tossing this out to my blog (and Facebook — this is a crosspost) because I’m an expert at missing the point and have extensive experience in being told I’m an idiot — those two things usually happen at the same time, in fact. When you say “I can do a 5K?” what do you mean?

I think when Judy says it, she means, “You can do a combination of running and walking and your distance will eventually total 3.1 miles,” whereas I’m saying, “Doing a 5K means running at a decent pace for the majority of the time and finishing in under 35 minutes.”

I realized though that if someone came to me and said, “I would love to write poetry, but I can’t,” I’d probably sound exactly like Judy: Of course you can.

Anybody can
do something like this
and it might be
crap
but who cares?
This is a poem.

I’d be doing a 5K in the same way that the above is a poem.

Anyhow, today’s “run” was 60 minutes, alternating 4 minutes running with 2 minutes walking, total 4.6 miles.