Once I got into the daily routine of walking the local tech park to start my morning, the only thing that stopped me was the weather. If the day was a rainout, I would reluctantly skip the walk altogether, but if it was nice enough to walk, I was usually out there as soon as my alarm went off at 5. This schedule continued through the end of September, to the point where the sun hadn’t even come up by the time I’d returned home from the walk. It wasn’t until October, when it had also started to get too cold in the morning, when I finally stopped my daily walks.
But even then, it hit 70 over night twice during the rest of 2020, and I was quick to capitalize on getting out there for the walks again.
While walking definitely got me back into fitness activities, there’s still a gulf between walking and running. During the social distancing era, I had also started incorporating light running into my daily fitness.
Backing up a little bit, in the winter of 2019, I had bought a fitness game for the Nintendo Switch called Ring Fit Adventure. The game included a Pilate wheel and a leg strap, each of which you would fit one of the Switch’s joycons into. The one inserted in the Pilate wheel would register any push and pull you made, as well as how you were holding it for things like Yoga poses. The one inserted into the leg strap would simulate how fast you were moving.
The concept behind the game was that you would navigate your way through levels, beating enemies by performing various different fitness exercises. By running in place, the game would simulate you running through the level. This was something I’d been nervous about, but I felt I could control my pace and move at a speed that was faster than a walk, but not really a run.
I had only found time to play it a hand full of times before the pandemic forced to world to shut down. Then, when I found myself telecommuting every day, I started incorporating this into my daily routine. My mornings started off with the four mile walk, and after work, I started to boot up the game more and more and play for longer and longer.
At first, I was playing it two times a week, alternating it between building up my stamina to walk the tech park, as well as exercising on my elliptical. I was also doing these exercises in my compression socks. Then, after I built up the stamina to walk the entire tech park and started my mornings with this exercise, I bumped it up to three days a week, alternating it just with the elliptical. I’d also stopped wearing the compression socks, because I wasn’t using them anymore, and although this sometimes had me nodding off after the workout, I built up the stamina to handle these exercises as well.
As telecommuting stretched out into the summer, and admittedly as I was growing burnt out from playing the game, I cranked up not just the number of times per week I did these exercises to every day after work, I also increased the play length to ninety minutes each day. I was also started to really go after it in these exercises, reaching the max difficulty it had to offer. I went from gingerly running in place, attempting to not aggravate my knee, to confidently running in place to try to get through as many levels as I could in one session.
And the more I did it, the more my body got used to running again. I had proved to myself that my legs could take the stress of running in place on a daily basis.
It was a great next step in my journey back to running. But I still had a long way to go to get into marathon shape. I had proved that I could run indoors, in place, for an extended period of time, and on a daily basis. But it would still be a few years before I tested myself to see if I could run not only outside, but from one point to another.