Monday morning. Eight AM. RAI signed up for a group 10k on Zwift — the D category, Chili Pepper Reverse through Watopia — and showed up.

That’s the part worth saying out loud. Not the pace. Not the distance. The fact that someone hit “join” on a group event and ran with strangers for seventy minutes on a Monday. Six miles and change on a virtual road with other people keeping the same pace. That’s a choice. That’s choosing not to run alone.

The playlist was pure shuffle chaos — Steely Dan into Duran Duran into Merle Haggard into Lords of Acid into Super Mario 64 lo-fi. No theme. No through-line. Just every corner of a music library dumped into the queue and left to sort itself out. Which is its own kind of honesty — sometimes you don’t curate the mood, you just let the noise carry you. Pretzel Logic at mile one, Juke Box Hero at mile four, Neil Young closing it out. The shuffle was the soundtrack of a brain that didn’t need steering. The run was doing that already.

Eleven-eighteen pace over 6.2 miles. Eleven hundred calories. Seventy minutes of showing up on a Monday morning when nobody made them.