Three and a half years between Zwift sessions. That gap tells its own story — one I’m not going to narrate because the point is that I came back. Two miles through virtual London at 9:53 pace. Sub-ten. Heart rate averaging 108 with a spike to 150, which means there were hills and I didn’t walk them. Seventy-eight feet of…

First time on Zwift in Innsbruck. Getting Started: Performance — the tutorial route, basically. 1.9 miles in eleven minutes. Not a workout. An introduction. David Guetta into Get Scared into Coco & Clair Clair. Three songs, three entirely different genres, the shuffle algorithm having an identity crisis while I figured out how virtual cycling works. Everybody starts somewhere. This was…

Week two of Zwift. Innsbruck this time, which means actual climbing — fifty-two feet in under two miles. The “Performance” starter ride, because apparently last week’s seven minutes in Watopia qualified me to graduate. Eleven minutes. David Guetta kicked it off, which — look, I don’t make the shuffle rules. Then Get Scared doing “Sarcasm,” which is a deep cut…

Seven minutes on Zwift. The “Getting Started” ride, which is exactly what it sounds like — clip in, pedal, figure out where the buttons are. 1.43 miles through Watopia, which is a fake place that somehow still has elevation gain. Sixteen feet of climbing in a world that doesn’t exist. Late May in Pensacola, which means it was probably 90…

Thirty-seven minutes, Monday night, Alice Glass in the headphones. Indoor again. No distance, no route, just time and volume. “Forgiveness” came on first — which is a hell of a way to start a workout. Then Urbangarde’s yeule remix, which sounds exactly like the inside of a brain that won’t sit still. Closed it out with MXMS doing “Timebomb,” which…

A third of a mile in twenty-four minutes. That’s not a walk, that’s barely leaving your chair. Lunch break math: stand up, go outside, exist in sunlight for a few minutes, come back. Saturday in early March. Probably warm already because it’s Pensacola and March barely qualifies as winter here. The pace — if you can call seventy-three minutes per…

Seventy-seven minutes. Over an hour of indoor work on a Tuesday night, no distance tracked, nothing to show for it except the fact that I did it. March now. Three days after the last one. Same format — just time and a body and whatever I could make happen in the space I had. An hour and seventeen minutes is…

Fifty-five minutes of something. No distance because there was nowhere to go. Just a room and a body and the decision to move it. February in Pensacola. The kind of night where you could sit on the couch or you could not. I chose not. Whatever I did in that hour — bodyweight stuff, stretching, pacing, some combination of all…

Valentine’s Day. 1.39 miles, thirty-five minutes. A Monday afternoon walk, no fanfare, no roses. RAI spent the holiday the same way they’d been spending their weeks — moving. A little farther than last time. A little more comfortable with the distance. The pace is easy, 25 minutes a mile, and that’s fine. They’re three months into this thing now, from…

Friday afternoon. 1.35 miles. Twenty-eight minutes. Read that again. A month ago RAI was walking a third of a mile. Now it’s over a mile, and the pace has come down from 90+ minutes per mile to 21. That’s not a walk around the mailbox anymore. That’s an actual walk with an actual route. February in Pensacola is mild. Good…