I ran ten miles in under an hour. It took eight thousand miles to prepare.

It was a trivial training session for me last night, definitely a fast one — I do speed workouts about twice a week, and this was a “tempo” effort — but I wasn’t going too hard.

Ten miles in less than an hour means running every mile in under six minutes. My exact pace was 5.59 minutes/mile.

Does it sound like I am very athletic?

I am now. I’m not just athletic; I am an athlete now.

But I love reminiscing about my journey. It wasn’t always like this.

Exactly three years ago, I started to run more. It was in the initial months of the pandemic year. The improvement was very gradual. I wasn’t a beginner because I had enjoyed a bit of running, but my level of running was at a completely different level. Facebook sometimes shows you “memories,” and it showed me this post from April 14th, 2020:

“Addicted” to interval running sounds a bit cringe, but such was the foundation of my improvement at running. I had run and jogged for two decades without much variety and then discovered the transformational power of interval running. For…