Time:

5:35 am to 6:05 am

Conditions:

Outdoor,  71 degrees

Training Maxim:

No hurry. No pause.

Training Performed

• 30 minutes of constant walking, jogging, walking hill shuttles (10x) with a set of 5 squats each time I reached the top of the hill.

3 Recommended Training Songs:

“Nowhere to Run”~ Martha Reeves and the Vandallas

“Always Right”~ The Alabama Shakes

“Renegades of Funk”~ Rage Against the Machine

Accomplishment:

Today marks 13 consecutive days of consecutive training. That is more training then I have done in 4 years and 9 months.

Takeaways:

For almost five years I believed in my illness more than I believed in myself. It’s only been 13 days of training but I have more energy, more confidence, more optimism then I’ve had in a long time.

Training is not as hard as my imagination created it to be. Sure, there were training sessions that hurt (Training Session #11) but before training, I let my imagination create a fictional narrative that convinced me jogging was not possible anymore.

Training has ballooned my spirit more than sleep ever has.

Tomorrow I’m resting. The College of New Jersey Track & Field Coach and friend Mike Walker has been offering encouragement and guidance through my training. He highly recommends I schedule a rest day. So after 13 days of training, and repeated attempts from Coach Walker, tomorrow Friday, June 15th I will rest.

Quote I’m Thinking about Today:

“Don’t believe your own fiction.”~(this is super pretentious) Jay Armstrong

To Celebrate My Rest Day Tommorow:

I’m releasing Chapter 2 of “The Man with the Hole is His Brain”

“The man turns back to the mirror. His eyes are deep blue like the child’s.  Below his soft chest,  beats the heart of a child–boundless and wild. A heart that yearns to play outside again. To run, jump, tackle, and swing. To sweat, to bleed, to get dirty again. A heart that is much younger then the body that holds it.”

“The Man with the Hole in His Brain” is work of creative nonfiction. It’s an ambitious literary attempt to tell my story and further explain why I’m training to run again.