I landed back in Spokane on August 15. Technically. However, my body was still somewhere over the Pacific.

After almost two weeks in Japan, an extremely long travel day, and crossing the International Date Line, I was home physically before my sleep schedule had any idea what was happening.

Garmin noticed.

For the next several days, I kept getting some version of the same message.

Jet lag. Poor sleep. Recovery needed. Apparently my watch was also adjusting poorly to being back in the United States.

The funny part was that I had spent most of Japan wishing I had brought my running gear.

Now I could finally run again.

I just happened to come home to a new job, an upcoming surgery, terrible sleep, and a body that thought 3 a.m. was a perfectly reasonable time to start the day.

Welcome home.

3 A.M. Seemed Like a Good Time to Start

On August 17, I woke up around 3 in the morning.

There was no going back to sleep.

So instead of lying there staring at the ceiling, I got up.

I did some yoga because my back was still angry about Japanese beds and international travel.

I worked in a short meditation.

And I started taking creatine monohydrate.

I had also begun paying more attention to getting enough protein.

A month earlier, my running routine was basically: Put shoes on. Go run.

Now I was awake before sunrise doing yoga, meditating, taking creatine, thinking about protein, and waiting for Garmin to tell me how poorly I had slept.

Apparently this is how hobbies escalate.

Still, there was something I liked about that morning. I could not fix jet lag on command. I could not control how the rest of the day was going to go. But I could do a few small things that made me feel like I was getting started again.

The Afternoon Made Things Real

That afternoon, I met with my surgeon.

I already knew shoulder surgery was a possibility. The appointment confirmed it. I was going to need surgery.

Even when you expect that answer, hearing it officially changes something.

There was now another interruption sitting on the calendar.

I had just spent five weeks building a running routine, immediately left for Japan for almost two weeks, and now I knew another break was coming.

There was not much I could do about that yet.

So later that day, I did something I had been thinking about for almost the entire trip. I ran.

The First One Back

I had imagined that first run quite a few times in Japan.

I thought about it in Tokyo. I thought about it in Nagoya. I thought about it in Hamamatsu.

There were days when I had the time to run and simply did not have the gear.

So when I finally got outside again, I expected it to feel great.

It did not.

At least not in the cinematic way I had pictured it.

It was hot. I had not eaten particularly well before going out. I was jet lagged. And running felt harder than I wanted it to.

But one thing surprised me.

My legs felt fine. My feet felt fine. Those had been some of my biggest concerns when I started this whole process.

Almost two weeks away had not suddenly made them forget how to run.

That was reassuring.

The rest of me was a different story.

My Legs Remembered

The next workout made that even clearer.

My legs and feet still felt good. My heart rate apparently had not received the same update.

I started out feeling controlled, but eventually I was watching the number on my wrist climb into the 180s and then the 190s.

That created a strange disconnect.

My legs were saying: “We’re fine.” My heart was saying: “We should discuss this.”

Instead of turning the workout into some test of whether I had lost fitness in Japan, I broke it into smaller pieces.

About a quarter mile at a time. Run. Recover. Run again.

It was not exactly what the workout had called for. It was what I needed that day.

A few weeks earlier, changing the workout might have felt like failing it. Now it just felt like adjusting.

Running Into Production

At the same time, I was adjusting to something completely different at work.

I had moved into Production.

For most of my career, I have been comfortable close to the technical side of aircraft maintenance.

I like knowing what is wrong. I like understanding the repair. I like the details.

Production immediately started pushing me in another direction.

I had to zoom out.

Instead of focusing on how one repair was being accomplished, I needed to think about the maintenance operation around it. What were the priorities? What aircraft needed attention? What resources did we have? What was going to affect the next shift or the next day?

The details still mattered. I just could not personally live inside all of them anymore.

That was uncomfortable for me. I naturally want to dig deeper.

Production required me to trust the people doing the work, ask the right questions, and keep the bigger picture moving.

In a weird way, running was asking me to do something similar.

I could collect all the information I wanted. Heart rate. Cadence. Sleep. Recovery. Training load.

But eventually I still had to make a decision based on the situation in front of me.

Sometimes the answer was to keep running. Sometimes it was to walk. Sometimes it was to leave something alone and trust the process.

I was learning both lessons at the same time.

Garmin Was Not Impressed

Garmin, meanwhile, remained deeply concerned about my life choices.

The jet lag notifications kept coming. My sleep was terrible. My recovery numbers reflected it.

Several days that week, my Body Battery eventually worked its way down to ‘5.’

That started becoming almost funny.

I would wake up, go to work, try to learn Production, fit in a workout, get through the rest of the day, and eventually check Garmin. 5. Again.

The watch was not telling me anything I did not already feel.

I was tired.

Japan had not magically disappeared from my body just because I had landed back in Spokane.

Neither had the stress of changing jobs.

And now I had surgery sitting somewhere in the future too.

There was a lot going on.

The Wrong Playlist

At least one problem that week was entirely self-inflicted.

Before Japan, I had started using a ‘165 BPM playlist’ because my cadence naturally seemed to settle into the beat.

It had become one of those little things that helped me stop overthinking every step.

Then I realized I had used the wrong playlist on one of my first runs back.

Of course I had. Jet lagged. Learning a new job. Trying to start running again. And somehow I still found time to notice that my music was wrong.

A few months earlier, I would not have even known what cadence meant.

Now I was apparently the kind of person who could tell when his running playlist was off.

I am still deciding whether that is progress.

More Than Getting Back Into Shape

I came home expecting to find out how much running fitness I had lost in Japan.

That turned out to be one of the less interesting questions of the week.

My legs remembered. My feet remembered.

What I had not accounted for was everything else. Jet lag. Bad sleep. Production. Surgery. Trying to rebuild a routine while also adding new pieces like yoga, meditation, creatine, and more intentional recovery.

None of those things existed separately. They were all happening at once.

And I think that is what I am starting to understand about this whole project.

There is rarely one clean problem to solve. Life does not wait for you to finish adjusting to one thing before handing you another.

Sometimes you are learning a new job while your watch tells you to sleep. Sometimes you are finally running again while knowing surgery is coming. Sometimes your legs feel great and your heart completely disagrees.

You just keep learning what to do with whatever shows up.

My first week back was not really about getting back into running.

It was about getting back into life.

And life was moving pretty fast.