Eleven PM and RAI loaded up Watopia — the virtual island that doesn’t care what time zone you’re in or what the scale said this morning. Five miles through a world that exists only in pixels, but the sweat was real. The playlist told the whole story. Slipknot cracked the door open, and then The Pretty Wild’s zero.point.genesis swallowed the…

Midnight on a Sunday and RAI is running laps in Watopia, three miles through hills that don’t exist but the effort does. A hundred and fifty-two beats per minute on the blood pressure cuff mid-run. Three miles in an hour. This is what it looks like when someone refuses to stop moving. The playlist was on full shuffle and it…

The starting gun was not a gun. It was John Murphy. “In the House — In a Heartbeat.” The 28 Days Later theme. That slow build from a single guitar note into full orchestral dread. RAI stood on the treadmill, queued the track, paused it, then restarted with under a minute to the Zwift countdown. The zombies do not start…

Wednesday night Zwift. The Zombie 5k group run, which sounds more exciting than it was — a slow lap through Douce France at a pace that barely registers as movement. Nineteen-minute miles. Heart rate at 136. The pace says walk but the heart says work — both true at the same time. Sometimes that’s what you sign up for on…

RAI got on the treadmill at 4:37 on a Friday afternoon. Not because they wanted to run — the pace tells you that much. 23:39 a mile is the speed of someone who promised themselves they’d move today and is keeping the promise without pretending it’s a race. But the heart rate tells a different story. 118 average. That’s not…

Virtual London at night on a November Zwift. 2.1 miles through the Classique route, which sounds elegant until you remember it’s a treadmill in a room and the London skyline is pixels. Twenty-one minutes. The kind of session you do because doing nothing felt worse. My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult and HEALTH on the speakers — industrial for…

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…

A third of a mile. Twenty-one minutes. January evening in the dark. This wasn’t exercise. This was getting off the couch and walking to the end of the street and back because the alternative was not moving at all. Paleskin in the earbuds — one song for the whole walk. Some days showing up is the entire workout. This was…

Almost hit ten. Ended at 9.9 miles, sixty-three minutes on the bike, and Ghost playing the entire time. Ten tracks of Tobias Forge carrying me through the last Florida heat of September. There’s something about Ghost on a long ride — the theatrical builds match the pace changes, the heavy drops land when the legs are burning, and Papa Emeritus…

Ten miles for a McMuffin. That was the deal. Breakfast had to be earned on a Saturday morning in July, Florida heat already building by 8 AM, and the only currency accepted was sweat. Armin van Buuren and Martin Garrix on the speakers — proper trance and EDM for a proper distance. Hi-Lo dropping bass while the miles dropped behind….