My iPhone's 4am broke the silence. I popped out of bed and chuckled. Today is my first day of training. This morning began with some light sweeping after yesterday's clean out of all my woodworking tools and wood. Though there is more work to be done, I wanted to jump right into my workout.

I have a modest home gym; it doesn't have everything I'd like, but it has all the features that I need right now: a dumbbell set, treadmill, a Bowflex, a recumbent bike, a healthy amount of floor mats, a flat bench, a Wavemaster, and a paltry gathering of barbell equipment—to be fair, I've always preferred dumbbells over barbells. Oh, and there's that 100lb Everlast bag in the corner whistling that old R.E.M. tune. I guess it's a shame I've traveled so much over time, because I would have tripled the amount of equipment with everything I've had to get rid of.

Yet, what I have is fantastic: I can do cardio, resistance, and work on my martial arts. Along with working within my own abilities, I'm finding that the key to success is creating a space that I WANT to visit. I mean, who wants to toil away in a place they'd just rather not be? And what do I like? Music of course! I've got a stereo receiver in my gym with an Amazon bluetooth attachment where I can feed Spotify from my iPhone. So with a selection from 1999, I hit it hard...

I haven't developed a program yet. That's not to say I ran wildly around my gym and randomly did reps. I've got resistance planned M-F; this morning, I followed the Rock's Jumanji back schema that can be found here and here. Since I don't have a Roman chair, the only thing I couldn't do was the hyperextensions. My plan is to adopt his workout into my own program inasmuch I have the equipment to do so for the sole reason of...fun.

After the resistance sets, I spent 30 minutes on the treadmill before cycling the last 10 minutes into 6am...which is a segue into my next approach: I want to build up my stamina and drop the weight to comfortably begin a ChiRunning program on July 1. It's not particularly complicated, I will just be following the half marathon and full marathon programs laid out in Dreyer's Chi Marathon so that by April 2019, I will run in the local one. Beyond that, for year snow, I've had this vision in my head of returning to Memphis to simply run in the cool spring air of a Saturday morning.

Of course, there's a series of steps to just get into a place where I can begin training twelve weeks from now. But, I'm got a little magic out of 1995 up my sleeve...