My first mile took 13 minutes and 31.3 seconds.

13 minutes and 31.3 seconds.

That’s the same as listening to the Tom Petty banger “What’s New Pussy Cat” 6 times. It’s almost a minute slower then the world record 5k time. My mile PR is 5:51 for god’s sake. It felt so slow.

This was the first time I have run in over 9 months (Limping my way through the Rock and roll half and straight into covid doesn’t count). A miss placed step during a hike and a sprained ankle in January stopped my running in its tracks. A resprain of that same ankle and the crippling heat of the Vegas summer kept my running shoes on the shelf. I turned my focus to long distance hiking and absolutely crushed my R2R2R through the end of summer into fall.

I want to use this as hard reset on my running. I read a “Training for the uphill Athlete” by Ultramarathoner god Kilian Jornet while preparing for my R2R2R. He Preaches the gospels of zone 1 and zone 2 training. He also enlightened me Aerobic Deficiency Syndrome (ADS). ADS in a nut shell is high intensity training made your aerobic system very inefficient. Any one who has ever run with me will know it sounds like you are running with Victorian chimney sweep missing a lung. So how do you fix ADS? You go slow. Very slow. Like zone one slow.

So I am gonna go slow.

My ADS ass can’t get much past a light jog without my heartrate climbing past 140 bpm. I am a prideful bastard. My ego was screaming at me to pick up the place every time I saw another person on the trail. But I will go slow. and i will keep going slow, for the next week, the next month. Each slow mile is brick that will use to build a tower. It going to be a tall phallic tower, but it starts with a single brick that reads proudly, “13 minutes and 31.3 seconds”.

My second mile was 14:55.9.