I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a runner.

Unless I am playing some intense Ultimate Frisbee or am trying to get somewhere really awesome in a short amount of time, I absolutely positively despise running. It makes every fiber of my being scream in pain just thinking about it. It makes me want to curl up into a ball and cry.

As far as exercise goes, I much prefer doing crunches, or using an elliptical machine. Or, like I said, playing Ultimate Frisbee. But in my opinion, mindless, purposeless running around and around a track is the most useless, uninteresting, unrewarding, most unfortunate way to spend any amount of time.

Especially half an hour. On a Saturday morning. When I would much rather be sleeping. Or reading. Or partaking in my morning ritual of a nice long shower followed by scrambled eggs on toast.

So it is my great misfortune to be attending a school where the PE final is running a 5K, which, in America, translates to 3.1 miles.

OK, it's not all bad. If I were still attending that small-town school where PE was only required for around a quarter out of the year, and I never ran more than a mile, I would weigh about a ton, what with my inability to resist things like pizza and those ridiculous cookie-dough brownies that always seem to be lurking somewhere in my house.

And the 5K is kind of fun, sometimes. Or, at least, it's fun when you first get there, and it's fun for around the first two minutes of running, or until I go, "Oh wait, I forgot, I actually really hate doing this and really don't want to do it for the next 2.9 miles."

But for the next 28 or 29 minutes, it is not fun. It is not fun trying to figure out which pond would be the most convenient to swim across in order to hide right near the end until a reasonable amount of time had passed, and it is not fun trying to decide whether or not I could pass the pond water off as sweat.

It is not fun having both shoes come untied and trying to figure out a way to retie them without stopping, and it's not fun tripping over shoelaces and almost stepping out of my shoes. It's definitely not fun having old men pass you and then go, "Heh heh heh, I'm an old man and I'm passing you!" (True story.)

The part that is the least fun of all is the last 200 yards, at which point either the finish line keeps getting farther and farther away or I just stop moving forward at all and begin running in place. I feel like my legs are going to fall off. My head is going to explode. My lungs are going to collapse.

Then, without ever having even touched a pond, I'm done. And once I regain feeling in my legs, and my head stops pounding, and my lungs start working again, and I realize how awesome that was.

Ha! I fooled you. You thought that this was going to be one of my I'm-going-to-change-the- world/school-with-my-cleverly-put-together-sentences rants, didn't you? You thought I was going to be all "Don't make us run a 5K anymore, that's mean, make my life a little easier, you mean adults who don't understand all the suffering I endure on a daily basis as a teenager living in the 21st century."

Well, I've already admitted that I totally hate running. There's no question about that. But I don't totally hate that satisfied feeling that comes after I've just run/power-walked more than three miles. I don't hate the feeling that once my stomach stops rumbling, I could eat anything I could possibly think of and it wouldn't matter in the slightest (though actually, the first thing I ate this time around was a nice ripe banana). I don't hate the fact that I'm on a path toward actually being fairly healthy for the rest of my life.

I also don't totally hate the thought of "Hey, I most likely don't have to do this again for an entire year unless I actually have to run it again like last year!"

I guess that in the end I actually really appreciate being forced to get up early to run for half an hour, no matter how much I may complain about it. That still doesn't mean that I have to look forward to next year, though.