Week 3 ended with three days away from running.

At the time, I was curious what that much rest would actually do.

Apparently, my legs had been paying attention.

Sunday morning I went back out for the first of the workouts I had pushed from the end of the previous week.

And I felt good. Not “I survived it” good. Actually good.

My feet felt good. My legs felt good. I had energy.

After spending the first few weeks constantly wondering whether something was going to start hurting again, that alone felt like progress.

I ended up getting a little aggressive toward the end of the workout and turning part of it into shorter, harder intervals.

Probably not exactly what “easy” was supposed to mean. Some habits die harder than others.

But I finished feeling good, and I was starting to trust my body a little more.

Two Miles

Monday was the one that really stuck with me.

The workout called for another easy run.

At some point, I realized I had been running for a while without thinking about stopping.

So I kept going.

One mile went by.

Then I started working on the second.

And for the first time in the entire program, I ran two miles continuously.

No walking break. No stopping to watch my heart rate come down.

Two miles.

That was a big one for me.

A little more than a week earlier, I had been excited about running 1.6 miles continuously.

Now I had two.

And what made it even better was that the two miles were almost identical in pace.

I did not blast the first mile and spend the second one trying to survive.

I just ran.

That was new.

There had been plenty of workouts during this program where I finished and immediately started analyzing everything that had gone wrong.

This one was different. I finished knowing I had done something I could not have done when I started.

No qualification needed.

Finding the Beat

Around this point, I also started experimenting with something else.

Music.

Obviously, I had already been listening to music when I ran. But now I was starting to pay attention to the tempo of it.

I used Garmin to show my average cadence and it came out to around 164 bpm, so I found a playlist built around 165 beats per minute and decided to try running with it.

BOOM! I noticed my cadence felt almost locked into the music.

Instead of thinking: Am I going too fast? Are my steps too long? What does my watch say? I could just follow the beat.

Step. Step. Step. Step.

It gave me a rhythm without making me constantly think about having a rhythm.

I remember looking at the data afterward and realizing my cadence had stayed damn near constant with the music.

That was pretty cool.

Week 3 had me thinking about breathing. Now I had breathing and music working together.

Slowly, running was becoming less about forcing my body to do the right thing and more about finding little ways to let it happen naturally.

Apparently Burgers Are Running Fuel

My nutrition strategy during this period was also extremely scientific.

At one point that included a BBQ bacon burger, seasoned fries, ranch, and a Mr. Pibb.

Elite athlete stuff.

I am not going to pretend I transformed my diet during this program.

I didn’t.

I was paying more attention to hydration and recovery, but I was also still living my normal life and eating food I enjoyed.

That balance mattered too.

I did not want running to become something that required me to reorganize every other part of my life around it.

I wanted it to fit into my life. There is a difference.

Just Another Run

Wednesday was another workout.

Nothing dramatic happened. No milestone. No breakthrough.

No great revelation about breathing, heart rate, cadence, or the meaning of life.

I just went running.

I put my shoes on. I started my watch. And then I ran.

When the workout told me to walk, I walked.

When it told me to run again, I ran again.

Then I finished. And I went home. That was pretty much it.

For some reason, I actually like that part of the story.

At the beginning of the program, every run felt like an event. Can I finish this? Is my foot going to hurt? Why is my heart rate doing that? Am I running too fast again?

By Wednesday, apparently I had reached the point where sometimes I could just go outside and run.

No existential crisis required.

I guess I just felt like running. (Please re-read that in a Forrest Gump voice)

So I did.

Thursday was a rest day. Then Friday arrived.

The last workout of the program.

The Last One

I knew Friday was the final scheduled workout of the five-week program.

I expected that to feel like a big deal.

Maybe I would finish and feel accomplished.

Maybe I would immediately start comparing where I finished with where I started.

Maybe Garmin would give me some number that made the whole thing feel official.

Instead, the moment I remember happened after the running was already over.

I was in the cooldown. Just walking.

And at some point I realized I was smiling.

Not because I had set a record. Not because the workout was over.

I was just walking around after a run and smiling.

That caught me off guard.

Five weeks earlier, running had mostly been frustration.

I had tried to come back too fast, irritated my foot, stopped, changed shoes, bought a Garmin, and started over.

Then came the walking breaks. The heart-rate spikes. The heat. The migraines. The frozen sleeve on my knees. The breathing experiments. The 90-second break that somehow made everything worse. The runs where I felt weak. The run where it somehow felt strong and extremely hard at the same time.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, something changed.

I had started enjoying this.

Two Miles and a Smile

If you asked me at the beginning of the five weeks what success would look like, I probably would have given you a number.

A faster mile. A certain pace. A distance. Something Garmin could measure.

And I did get some of those things.

I ran two miles continuously. I could run farther than I could when I started. I had gotten better at controlling my pace, breathing, and rhythm.

Those things mattered.

But I think the better indication of what changed happened during that last cooldown.

I was walking. And smiling.

I wanted to keep doing this.

That was probably worth more than any number my watch could give me.

The timing was also pretty funny.

I had finally spent five weeks building a routine that was starting to feel normal.

Two days later, I got on a plane and left for Japan for two weeks.

So much for the routine.