Fifteen weeks into a nine-week programme

In part one, I left myself having just discovered the NHS Couch to 5K programme, and thinking, with some relief, that I could probably manage it. Run slowly. Walk in between. Do a little more each week. How hard could it be?

The early weeks were genuinely manageable. Running for sixty seconds, walking for ninety. Running for ninety seconds, walking for two minutes. Achievable. Encouraging. Steve Cram's voice in my headphones, calm, measured, not at all smug about the fact that he is Steve Cram and I am not, guided me through each session with the manner of someone who believed, at least professionally, that I could do this.

I began to think he might be right.

Week seven

Week seven of Couch to 5K asks you to run for twenty-five minutes continuously. No walking breaks. Just twenty-five minutes of running, which, if you've been following the programme to that point, is presented as a natural progression from what came before.

It did not feel like a natural progression. It felt like someone had moved the goalposts into another postcode.

I attempted week seven. I failed week seven. I went back and attempted week seven again. I failed it again. Steve Cram remained encouraging throughout each attempt, which I found both touching and, by the third or fourth repetition, mildly irritating. He did not seem to share my growing suspicion that week seven was unreasonable.

I persevered, partly out of stubbornness, and partly because I'd already mentioned to people that I was doing this, and backing out felt considerably worse than failing quietly in a field somewhere.

The moment things changed

Something shifted after that first thirty-minute run. Not dramatically. I didn't emerge from it with a new philosophy of life or an urge to enter a marathon. There was no epiphany, no sudden love of the thing. But the relationship changed quietly and permanently. Running stopped being a thing I was effortfully trying to do and became a thing I did.

By the end of 2019, I had taken part in three 10K events. I had become a regular at Parkrun, the free, weekly, timed 5K that happens in parks across the country every Saturday morning, and which I cannot recommend highly enough as a way to make running social and habitual without costing anything. And I had bought the most expensive pair of running shoes I had ever owned, which felt like a commitment of a different kind entirely.

Whether any of that matters in the long run, and what I've learned in the six years since, is the subject of part three. The short version: I'm still running. Three times a week, every week. That, I think, is the point.