Fake running with a little reality thrown in

This morning, as the next step on my road to recovery, I tried to go for a walk. Except I did everything that one would do while going for a run, with the plan of doing it a lot slower and shorter. Let me explain.

One of the more difficult things I had to do to prepare for this excursion was to find everything that I "needed" to run and by everything I don't mean sneakers (aka running shoes) but all of the necessary "accessories." I found my trusty Garmin 910xt, that I later found had not been used since August 2015, and plugged it in to charge. I found two of my ancient ipod shuffles, charged one and sort of remembered that one was dying back then but forgot what that meant and which one it was. I never got around to putting music on my iPhone 6+ which is too big to carry while running so that raised a phone problem to solve in the future - in the meantime I'll carry that brick around. I found my Rudy Project glasses stashed in the center console of my car (a miracle in that it was were it was supposed to be). Got dressed - the running shorts still fit, the shirts not so much because of my being fat. Threw on a triathlon hat - chose Timberman 70.3 since it matched my non-running Big Dog cotton t-shirt and drove to the local trail.

I was going to start at about the 3.5 mile marker and head north on the trail. I knew there was a cross street at about 4.25. I was originally thinking I could make it to that cross street then turn around getting in 1.5 miles but quickly realized that my last attempt at walking, I mean fake running, was 0.25 miles on the dreadmill and was an abysmal failure. I reset my objectives to make it to the 4.0 and next time, if this experiment was successful, try for the cross street. I hit start on the Garmin and off I went.

My ipod shuffle died during it's second song, 0.18 miles in, but I kept going. The 3.75 mile marker wore away (these are seemingly home made markers) but my back was only beginning to yip at about the 4.0. I turned around, headed back to the car and finished with 1.15 miles in 23.11 for a not so blistering pace of 20:18/mile.

In my so-called glory days, my goal was to walk faster than 17:00/mile so there is work to do. But I view today as progress.

Who knows, maybe one day fake running might turn into real running. If it does, I'll at least look the part.