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The Week That Wasn’t Dramatic (Until It Was)

Monday started with nothing to report. A solid easy run, HR right where it should be, legs recovering well even after a hard weekend. I’ve learned that “nothing to report” at this stage of a block is actually the point — it means the system is working.

Tuesday, the 400s humbled me. I couldn’t finish the first one. Came out too hot, no calibration, hadn’t done that kind of speed work in a while. It’s the same pattern I saw with 200s a few weeks back — new stimulus, get knocked down, adapt, repeat. Progressive overload isn’t a straight line up. It’s a sawtooth. Feel strong, get weak again, feel strong.

By Wednesday my Training Readiness, a Garmin metric, had crashed to 32 out of 100, after a genuinely good night’s sleep. That was the clearest signal of the week: this wasn’t a sleep problem anymore, it was accumulated load. Two hard days, a fueling gap, a body carrying some systemic fatigue. I took the rest day for what it was. No heroics. Just rest, rehab, protect the sleep.

The Real Mistake of the Week

Here’s the one I have to own. Twice this week — Tuesday before the 400s, and again Thursday morning — I realized I was within striking distance of a 5K PR mid-run. And I chose the worst possible path: the middle road. Ran harder than the training plan called for, but nowhere close to actually committing to the PR attempt.

That’s not a hedge. That’s the guarantee of getting neither.

I could have committed to the training pace. I could have committed to sending it for the PR. Instead I split the difference and got the benefit of neither the prescribed stimulus nor the record. And here’s the part that actually matters: everything is training. Not metaphorically — mechanically. Half-assing a run on a Tuesday morning is practice at half-assing. That rep doesn’t stay on the trail. It shows up in the next hard conversation, the next decision, the next moment that calls for a real commitment one way or the other.

The body doesn’t know the difference. It’s all the same muscle.

Redemption on Saturday

Saturday’s long run gave me a chance to apply the lesson. Two and a half hours programmed, and partway through, a half marathon PR came into view. This time, I set the boundary before I needed it: I would allow five to ten minutes extra to get it, if it happened naturally within the training effort. No more. No chasing.

I got it — 2:34:17, about twelve minutes under my old PR — without compromising the run to force it. That’s the difference between a decision and a drift.

The fueling finally clicked, too. Real food this time: boiled salted potatoes, a turkey sandwich, sugar wafers, and sweet tea. City folks can keep their Coca-Cola as endurance nectar. I’ll take sweet tea. My body handled real fuel across two and a half hours better than it’s handled anything all block.

And mentally, I wasn’t strong going in. No crisis, just flat. The whole run turned into more of a mental endurance session than a physical one. Which might be exactly the kind of data point I need most heading toward September — proof that the discipline holds even when the tank isn’t full going in. The sweet tea just after mile 8 did a lot to turn it around, and the possibility of a natural half marathon PR was the carrot I needed to see it through.

What I Actually Learned About My Own Ground

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I discovered something about the mile loop I’ve been training on. Garmin’s been quietly logging nearly thousands of feet of elevation gain on my long runs — while guys posting comparable mileage online are showing a couple hundred feet, max. I’d never once looked at that number. Never thought to.

It reframes the whole block, actually. If my “easy” runs have been carrying real vertical work the whole time, that explains why my performance has kept exceeding what the training predicted. The ground itself has been the coach nobody told me I hired. My perception was the 1-mile loop was rather flat, but the objective measurements are telling me I’m wrong.

The Thesis of the Week

Between the half-assed 5K and the disciplined half marathon, between the crashed Training Readiness and the sweet tea recovery, one line kept surfacing, and it’s the one I want to end on:

The real heroics is doing the daily work that needs doing, as it ought to be done.

Not the PR. Not the race. The rest day taken instead of the bonus run chased. The rehab band work with no one watching. A second run on Thursday evening run in 90-plus degree heat index, after a full day of carpentry in the same weather, when nobody asked if I did it and nobody cheered when I finished — because there are men waiting for me in September to see the work I’ve done, whether they’re watching this week or not.

Week 6, hold week, starts now. No heroics. Just the work.

You don’t have to take ownership of every thought that enters your mind.

I know that sounds strange at first. We tend to assume that what we think is who we are. But the ancient Christian tradition has a more nuanced and more liberating view than that. The Greek word “logismoi” — used by the desert fathers and echoed in Paul’s letters — refers to assaultive thoughts that come at us, not from us.

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The thought that whispers you’re a failure. The thought that tells you you’ll never change. The thought that says this isn’t worth the effort. These don’t necessarily originate with you. And you don’t have to agree with them.

This is the battlefield.

Paul writes in Ephesians 6 that our struggle “is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world.” He’s not writing science fiction. He’s describing the daily, real experience of every man who has ever tried to live a life of faith and found that something inside keeps fighting against it.

The first target of the Enemy is always your identity in Christ. If he can get you to doubt who you are — a beloved son of God, created with purpose, redeemed and being redeemed — then he doesn’t need to attack anything else. The house collapses from within.

But here’s the good news: Jesus has already won the war.

The Enemy knows this. He fights on anyway, but his strategies are limited. 2 Corinthians 10:4-5 says our weapons “have divine power to demolish strongholds… we demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”

Take captive. Notice the military language. This is not passive. This is not simply “thinking positively.” This is a trained, disciplined practice of examining thoughts as they arise and asking: does this agree with what God says is true?

There are five stages to how a thought can take root and become a stronghold: assault, interaction, consent, defeat, and obsession. The place to stop it is at the first stage — when it assaults you. If you begin to interact with it, to entertain it, to negotiate with it, you’re already losing ground. I know this from the inside.

One Saturday evening I returned to an old sin pattern. I knew it was wrong before, during, and certainly after. The accuser told me, “See, you’ve done it again, because this is who you really are.” And I thought he was right. However, I still went to church that Sunday. As I sat in service I thought I should go to the altar and pray for forgiveness, even though I didn’t think I deserved it, and, in a real sense, I didn’t even want it. That is what the Word tells me to do. So, I did it. While I was praying, asking for forgiveness I didn’t think I deserved, I had an image of the Father holding me in His arms and I was screaming in his face, “You can’t forgive me, I won’t let You.” He simply replied, “Child, I already have, why haven’t you?”

That is the victory we already inhabit. We are not slaves to every thought that assaults us — we can take them captive, examine them, and redirect them toward what is true.

Philippians 4:8 gives us the alternative target for our minds: “whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable — think about such things.”

This is not spiritual escapism. This is training your mind to dwell where strength grows rather than where weakness takes root. What you set your gaze on, you move toward. Fix your eyes on Jesus, as Hebrews 12 says, and you’ll run the race marked out for you. Fix your eyes on your failures, your inadequacies, your fear, and you’ll spiral into them.

The battlefield is in your mind. You must train it. We rarely rise to the occasion but fall to the level of our training. The assault doesn’t come when you’re strong.

During my long run yesterday, in which I was already not mentally strong going in, the assault came hard. A recurring thought I didn’t want. I chuckled, “really picking your spot, huh.” I didn't fight it harder or try to muscle it out — I prayed. "Lord, forgive me of my sins. I know I haven't been as attentive to you as I should be. Forgive me for that. Help me to cleanse my mind. In Jesus' name I pray, amen." It worked.

The battlefield is real. But so is your armor. Put it on.

Start Here:

Use the journal to examine your thoughts. Test them against the truth of Scripture and practice redirecting them to whatever is true, noble, and right.

Next week — what you give your attention to is what you worship. And the Enemy knows it.

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I was always left with the question of “how much,” and always the answer is “more.” So, I give more. I ask the question again, and the answer is still, “more.” Always more. The real answer? It’s never enough, until you’re dead.

I know I’m not the only man who feels that way.

Then I found a man who looks like me. He had a different life than me, but he was a man who carried the same weight and it hadn’t destroyed him. He was going somewhere with it. But he wasn’t doing it alone.

That man’s name is .

He’s a husband, a father, a man with a full life and a career. He’s also a man who does hard things with his body — and he does them with other men. When I found him I recognized something I didn’t have a word for yet.

At the Prairie on Fire Backyard Ultra last September, hanging out before the race, he said something I’ve been carrying ever since:

“I’m in a season of life where if I’m going to have friends, they’re going to have to be doing the same things I’m doing. Runs, hikes, lifts. That’s all the time I have outside of my family and career.”

I knew it was true for me too. But I didn’t fully understand what it meant until this June, when he hosted a training camp at his home. I wasn’t there. I read his recap from the sidelines — meals at his table, hard things where he lives, men in his actual life. Not a program. A man who opened his life and said come.

Reading that recap, I recognized something. Not something new, but something I’d already lived and hadn’t understood. The same thing had been happening to me; I just hadn’t seen what it looked like.

Here’s what I realized. I don’t have to do it alone. I don’t have to wait to get to where the community is. I can bring it to where I am. Show up publicly. Do the hard things I’m already doing. Do them consistently and out loud. Let the men find me.

Because they’re out there. Drowning in the same silence. Carrying the same weight. Looking for the same thing I was looking for — proof that it doesn’t have to cost everything. Proof that the weight can mean something. Proof that a man can carry it and not be destroyed by it.

What changes when the hard things stop being solitary isn’t the hard things.

It’s you.

I’m fit enough to feel what’s coming. That makes right now the most dangerous part of the training block.

Week 4 of 15 is done. 32+ miles. One of the top three mileage weeks of my life. And I feel good — which is exactly the problem.

Not a bad problem. But a real one.

When you’re deep in a building phase and the fitness starts arriving early, something shifts. The question stops being “can I do more” and starts being “should I.” The answer, almost always, is not yet. The plan exists for a reason. Phases exist for a reason. What I do in Week 4 is protecting what I’ll need in Week 10.

That discipline showed up a few times this week in concrete ways. A half marathon PR was sitting right there on Saturday’s long run. I left it. There was no point in taking it. It’ll come when it’s supposed to — inside the plan, not ahead of it.

The Saturday run almost didn’t happen at all. Life pushed it to noon. That’s been the pattern the last three weeks — something delays the long run, and the first two weeks it didn’t happen. This week there was no question. Just “when,” not “whether.” That’s a different place to operate from.

Something else shifted this week that’s worth naming. Being fully inside a training block didn’t make me neglect my obligations. It made me stop negotiating with them.

When the training matters, wasted time costs something real. So I stop wasting it. Tasks that used to get deferred just get done, because I can see clearly what the delay is costing me. The priority structure sharpens everything around it, not just the running.

But I want to be honest about why. It’s not just discipline. My wife is crewing for me at Prairie on Fire this year. My family is making the trip. That changes something. I’m not just protecting the training — I’m protecting the experience we’re going to share. Every obligation I handle without dragging my feet is margin I’m building for her, for us. The race isn’t just mine anymore. That’s a powerful motivator to stop negotiating and just do the thing.

What the Week Actually Looked Like

I hit every prescribed run and maxed the mileage on each one. The workouts were a different story — I missed a couple. That’s part of working everything out inside a real training block with a real life. The running is locked in at something close to identity level right now. The supporting work is still finding its place in the week. I’m not alarmed by it, but I’m not ignoring it either. Those workouts exist for a reason I felt on Saturday’s long run — more on that in a minute.

The Topo Phantom 4 got its third run this week. I’ve capped them at two runs per week intentionally. They’re allowing my foot to function the way it’s supposed to, which means my posterior tibialis tendons are doing work they’ve been offloaded from for years. It’s adaptation, not injury. Two runs, same pattern — some protest in the first twenty minutes, then steady improvement. Getting better each time.

What the Body Is Telling Me

Saturday’s long run was 11.55 miles with 6,729 feet of elevation. Two hours and fifteen minutes. I had enough left at the end to know a half marathon PR was available. I left it there.

What I took instead was information.

Around mile 5, my HR spiked. I knew what it was — under-fueling. I got something in and it settled within half a mile and never came back. My body told me exactly what it needed and when. Fueling is the next thing to dial in. I’m hitting every 30 minutes, but the quantity needs to scale up to match the effort. That’s the work between now and September.

I also caught something on the descents. My knees were caving inward, which was causing overpronation. My body was compensating to relieve pressure on my patellar tendons — a workaround it developed somewhere along the way. I caught it, corrected it, and ran the rest of the descent with intention. Nearly 20,000 steps in that run. That’s nearly 20,000 reps of reprogramming.

This is what the building phase actually feels like from the inside. Not just miles accumulating, but the body revealing what still needs work. The runs are the diagnosis. The rehab is the treatment. You can’t separate them.

What I’m Learning About the Building Phase

I used to think feeling like garbage was a sign of hard work. That suffering was the metric. By Wednesday of last week I was crushed. This Wednesday I felt good. Same program, one week of adaptation, completely different experience.

I’m learning that hard work and misery aren’t the same thing. A well-supported training block — fueled, slept, structured, with rehab built in — feels different than grinding. The output can be the same or greater, but the internal experience is completely different.

Thursday evening’s run taught me something else. I didn’t want to go. Sinus headache. Tired legs. Had to help my wife with something after work. I went anyway. It was miserable by every metric.

But I didn’t become the misery.

That’s the distinction that matters for a backyard ultra. There will come a moment, deep in the night, somewhere past where I’ve ever been, when everything hurts and the question is whether to go out for another loop. I haven’t been there yet. But when I get to that hard yard — and I will — I’ll know how to handle it. Thursday evenings in June are how I’ll get through it.

Week 4 Done

After 11.55 miles and 2+ hours on Saturday, I came home and played airsoft with my kids. My stepson is in the Army. He’s aggressive and reckless. I’m aggressive and wise. I was least shot and most hits.

I’m 48, built more like a lifter than a runner, and I just put in one of the top three mileage weeks of my life and felt good doing it. Last year at this point in training I was feeling like garbage. This year the data and the body are telling the same story — something real is being built.

32.42 miles. Every run hit. A couple workouts missed. One PR left on the table on purpose. One Thursday evening run that was miserable and necessary. One bedroom AC unit finally installed, because sleep is not optional when you’re doing serious work.

Week 5 starts tomorrow.

Show up. Do the work.

And if you dismiss it, this program won’t work.

Forget morning routines. What I’m interested in is a morning ritual. Is there a difference? Yes. A routine is horizontal, self-referential, optimizing toward your own goals. A ritual is vertical, it connects you to something outside and above yourself, it locates you in a story that was running before you were born and will continue after you're gone.

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For over forty years of my life I was a night owl. The nighttime was my world. I’d get up in just enough time to get dressed and off to work. Then, no matter what time I went to sleep, I started waking up at 4:30am — wide awake. Initially, I tried to roll over and go back to sleep, annoyed. Then it occurred to me that the Lord was the one waking me up, like He did Samuel. You see, my routine didn’t leave much space for the Lord in my life, because like most of us, once my day started it was largely out of my control, and by the end of the day I was vegging out.

So, like Samuel, I got up at 4:30 and prayed, repeating his word, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Do you know how quiet the world is at 4:30am? It seems the whole world is asleep. It was in that quiet, unhurried offering that I found Him. Present. Real.

I found in giving the Lord that space He not only filled my cup to full but also to overflowing. I was able to give to others from overflow rather than running myself dry. In offering the Lord those first hours, meeting with Him before anyone else, I became the best version of myself, a better husband, father, son, Christian, and man.

I didn’t realize it at first, but the Lord was leading me to give Him my first fruits.

We are called to offer the Lord the first fruits of ourselves. But I was throwing Him the scraps — the leftovers of a day that's already spent.

As Christians we are called to a different rhythm than the world. In this running with the Devil world, we are to walk with the Lord. In Mark 1:35 Jesus got up when it was still very early and went to a solitary place to pray.

Jesus knew we'd have things to worry about. In Matthew 6:33 he doesn't dismiss those concerns — he reorders them. Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

This morning ritual became the lifeblood of my spiritual life. I wanted other men to have access to what I'd stumbled into, so I tried to systematize it — to make it repeatable and transferable. What emerged was shaped by two things: the Lord's Prayer and Philippians 4:6-7.

Paul gives us the formula in Philippians 4: 6-7 — thanksgiving, then petition, then the peace that guards your heart and mind. That's the order. And that’s how I arranged the Journal page.

We live most of our lives on autopilot. We make tens of thousands of decisions every day, and the overwhelming majority of them aren’t conscious choices — they’re the product of old habits, old wounds, old beliefs we’ve never examined. The Journal interrupts that autopilot. It makes what is implicit in our daily routine and thinking, explicit — calling them out for examination and to give an answer.

And self-knowledge is the beginning of change.

I also include an evening journal entry, which is simply a brief reflection on the day. The purpose for this is mainly to write down and acknowledge your wins, no matter how small. Here’s the thing, when you’re trying to change your life there is no such thing as small wins — they’re just wins. I also found, when I didn’t write them down, my mind would literally edit out the wins and focus on the negatives. The evening journal rewrites that.

Psalm 143:8 opens with a farmer’s prayer: “Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love, for I have put my trust in you. Show me the way I should go, for to you I entrust my life.”

That’s what the morning Journal does. It sets our first intention on seeking the Lord — before we’ve made a single decision, before we’ve encountered a single demand, before the noise of the day has begun.

Here is what I know to be true after years of this: the days I skip the Journal are the days I drift. The days I do the Journal are the days I’m grounded. Not perfect — grounded. Groundedness doesn’t mean nothing goes wrong. It means I’m rooted enough to bend without breaking when it does.

Don’t despise this small beginning.

Start Here

You can download the journal page from my website at RDP Coaching, grab a devotional or reading plan — if you don’t have one, start in the Psalms or Proverbs — and show up tomorrow morning with the intention of meeting the Lord. Open the page. Give Him your first twenty minutes.

Next week we talk about the battlefield — and why not every thought that enters your mind belongs to you.

I want to start somewhere you might not expect.

The year is around 520 BC. A remnant of Israel has returned from seventy years of exile in Babylon. They are home — but home is rubble. The temple Solomon built, the center of their worship and identity, is destroyed. And God raises up a man named Zerubbabel to rebuild it.

Zerubbabel is not a general. He’s not a king in any conventional sense. He’s a governor of a small, struggling people in a land that used to be theirs. And he begins the work of rebuilding with what he has — which isn’t much. He’s standing there with a plumb line in his hand. A basic tool. A string with a weight on it, used to check whether a wall is straight.

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And the people around him are not impressed. The old men who remembered Solomon’s temple are weeping because what Zerubbabel is building looks so small by comparison. Others are despising the work — dismissing it before the walls are even up.

Into that moment, God speaks through the prophet Zechariah:

“Do not despise these days of small beginnings, for the LORD rejoices to see the work begin.”

Not completed. Not impressive to the observers. Not yet anything that looks like what it will become.

Begun.

God looks at Zerubbabel standing in the rubble with a plumb line in his hand — the most basic tool of the work — and he rejoices. The temple will be built. But right now, in this moment, what God is celebrating is that the man showed up and started.

I think a lot of us are Zerubbabel right now in some area of our lives. Standing in front of something that needs to be built or rebuilt. Holding a plumb line that feels embarrassingly small for the size of the work. And somewhere in the back of our minds, we’re hearing the voice that says — this is not enough. You are not enough. This doesn’t count.

God says: don’t despise it. I rejoice to see it begin.

MY SMALL BEGINNING

Let me tell you what that looked like in my own life.

For a long stretch of time, I woke up most mornings asking myself the same question. “Is today the day?” I knew I needed to get in shape. I’d known it for a while. And most mornings the answer was the same: not today.

I want to be honest with you about something, because I think it matters. I didn’t answer that question immediately when it changed form. Eventually it became, “if not now, when?” and even then, I carried it for a while before the answer shifted. I don’t know exactly what finally moved it. What I know is that I held onto the question, and I didn’t condemn myself for every morning I still said no. And eventually, the answer came: now.

That “now” looked like this: a two-day shoulder workout my coach gave me. Just two days a week. I wasn’t even a full plan. It was an add-on program, but it was more than I had been doing.

I had carried serious shoulder problems for over twenty years. Accumulated damage from hard physical work — the kind of thing you eventually stop expecting to change. You adapt around it. You accept it as just the way your body is now. I had accepted that story.

I did those two workouts a week for five weeks. Nothing else. Showed up, did the work.

At the end of five weeks, ninety percent of the shoulder problems I had written off as permanent were gone.

That experience rewrote something I believed. Not just about my shoulder — about what’s possible when you stop despising the small start and just begin. The body can heal. Areas of our lives we have quietly given up on can change. But not if we keep waiting for a beginning that looks impressive enough to be worth starting.

My beginning was a plumb line. And the work got done.

What I couldn’t see then was where that beginning was leading. I’m now coaching men in fitness — and what I’ve found is that as men do the work on their bodies, they grow in their faith. The physical and the spiritual are not as separate as we’ve been told. That question I kept waking up with, asking myself about getting in shape? In ways I never could have predicted, it was an unction of the Holy Spirit. Not just calling me to fitness. Calling me here.

His ways are not our ways. The thing you think is too small to matter, too ordinary to be sacred, too personal to be Kingdom work, it may be exactly what God is using. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 12 that the body has many parts, and the ones we think are less honorable, God clothes with greater honor. Nothing is wasted in his economy. No beginning is too small for his purposes. The question you can’t quite put down may already be his hand on your life, pointing you somewhere you cannot yet see.

THE SIZE OF THE FAITH ISN’T THE POINT

Jesus has some things to say about this that connect directly.

In Matthew 17, the disciples come to Jesus frustrated because they couldn’t cast out a demon. They ask him why. And he says: “Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move.”

Notice what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say go get more faith and then come back. He says the size isn’t the issue. A mustard seed is one of the smallest seeds in the agricultural world they knew. And he says that’s enough, if it’s directed at the right thing.

The disciples asked Jesus in Luke 17 to increase their faith. It sounds like a reasonable request. And Jesus redirects them completely. He essentially says that you don’t need more faith. Use what you have. The issue isn’t quantity. The issue is whether you act on what you already believe.

And then there’s the father in Mark 9. His son has been tormented since childhood. He’s tried everything. He’s brought him to the disciples and they couldn’t help. He’s exhausted and he’s desperate and he comes to Jesus and says —

“If you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.”

Jesus catches the “if.”

“If you can? All things are possible for the one who believes.”

Let that land for a moment.

All things are possible for the one who believes. That is one of the most staggering statements Jesus makes in the Gospels. And he delivers it to a man who is about to give one of the most honest responses anyone gives him:

“I believe — help my unbelief.”

That man came to Jesus with partial faith. Mixed faith. Faith that had doubt woven right through it. He didn’t clean it up before he brought it. He brought what he had, the belief and the unbelief together, and Jesus honored it. His son was healed.

God is not waiting for your faith to be impressive before he meets you in it. He honored a man who said, “I believe” and admitted in the same breath that he also didn’t fully believe. He told his disciples that the size of the seed wasn’t the problem — the problem was not planting it.

Don’t despise the small faith. Use it. God meets you in the beginning, not after you’ve arrived.

A WORD FOR YOU

So let me ask you directly.

What is the area of your life where you’ve been waking up and asking yourself, “Is today the day?” Where have you been holding the question, maybe for weeks, maybe for months, maybe longer, and the answer keeps coming back “not today”?

Maybe it’s your health. Maybe it’s a broken relationship you haven’t had the courage to address. Maybe it’s a call you believe God has placed on your life that you keep saying you’ll pursue when the time is right, when you’re more ready, when the circumstances are better. Maybe it’s a habit, a sin pattern, a wound you’ve been carrying so long you’ve started to accept it as just how it is.

Here’s what I want you to hear: if that thing keeps coming back — if you can’t quite put the question down no matter how many mornings you say no — that is not just your own stubbornness or guilt. That is the unction of the Holy Spirit. That is God, who began a good work in you, being faithful to bring it to completion.

Philippians 1:6 says: “He who began a good work in you is faithful to bring it to completion.” The persistence of the question is itself evidence of his faithfulness, not just yours. He doesn’t start something and abandon it. He is at work in the returning of that question, morning after morning, until you are ready to answer it.

So don’t drop it. Don’t condemn yourself for the mornings the answer is still no. Stay in it. The answer shifts when you’re ready, and sometimes, you get ready by simply refusing to stop asking.

And when the answer does change — when your “now” arrives — start small. Embarrassingly small. Whatever is genuinely one step more than you’re doing today. Two workouts. One conversation. One prayer. One act of obedience in the direction of what you know you’re supposed to do.

Don’t add to it until that first step is solid. Then add one thing.

God is not impressed by the size of your beginning. He rejoices that it began.

THE TEMPLE GETS BUILT

Zerubbabel stood in the rubble of what used to be the temple with a plumb line in his hand. The people around him were weeping and dismissing and despising what they saw.

God was rejoicing.

The temple got built.

Whatever you are standing in front of today — whatever pile of rubble, whatever thing that needs to be started or rebuilt or finally begun — God is not waiting for it to look impressive. He is not waiting for you to have enough faith or enough resources or enough confidence.

He who began a good work in you is faithful to complete it.

He rejoices to see the work begin.

Do not despise this day of small beginnings.

If not now, when?

If you haven’t read the original, start there — The Healthy Body Workout. It lays the foundation. This piece assumes you’ve at least skimmed it, because I want to go somewhere the first one didn’t.

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Where I’m At

I’m currently in week 3 of a 15-week training block for Prairie on Fire, a backyard ultra in September. For those unfamiliar, a backyard ultra is a last-man-standing format — you run a 4.167-mile loop every hour, on the hour, until only one person is left moving. Last year I completed 42 miles. I’m going back to go further.

Week 3 was a significant jump in training load. 26 miles of running — only the 5th time in my life I’ve hit that weekly mileage. Double day Thursday. A full strength and rehab schedule throughout. And Saturday, my longest training run since Prairie on Fire last September: 9.39 miles, two hours, Arkansas summer heat.

I still have to get into week 4. The work isn’t done — it’s compounding.

Sunday Morning

After Saturday’s long run, my patellar tendonitis flared. Not severe, but present — noticeable on stairs, manageable with activation and alignment, but there. My quads were genuinely sore in a way I hadn’t felt in a while, which is actually a good sign. The rehab work is redistributing load more correctly across the leg, and the quads are waking up to their actual job.

Sunday morning, before anything else, I did a full rehab and activation sequence. Short foot. Glute bridge. Side plank clamshell. Dead bug. Face pulls. Adductor work. Heel lowers. Kickstand RDL.

After that session, the legs came back to life. The soreness that had been sitting in my quads and knees cleared significantly. The patellar tendonitis quieted down. That’s not coincidence — that’s the work doing exactly what it’s designed to do. Not just injury prevention. Active recovery. Keeping the system functional so tomorrow’s training is possible.

That’s the Healthy Body Workout in action.

The Thing I Didn’t Say the First Time

Here’s the honest confession that didn’t make it into the original piece.

It’s easy — if you’re not actively taking inventory of your body or your programming — to just avoid the weak spots and keep hammering the strong ones. Call it good work and move on. At least, it is for me.

I’m naturally good at strength training. My body loves it. It’s my jam. Endurance is harder. The posterior chain rehab work, the foot activation, the single leg stability stuff — none of that is as fun as adding weight to a bent over row. But the half that isn’t fun is the half that keeps you in the game.

Hebrews 12 says it plainly: take a new grip with your tired hands and strengthen your weak knees. The author isn’t talking about training. But the principle lands. You don’t get to skip the weak knees because the hands feel strong. The weak spot is exactly where the work belongs.

A consistently tight muscle is a weak muscle. This is more than stretching. It’s targeted strength work in the places you’ve been ignoring, done consistently enough that your body stops sending distress signals and starts building real capacity.

The Healthy Body Workout, Deeper

The concept hasn’t changed since I first wrote it: this is a philosophy more than a program. The question is always the same — where am I currently weak or tight? The answer tells you what to do that day.

What has changed is my own application of it. I’ve been more intentional about the full kinetic chain — foot to hip — and I’m seeing the payoff in real time. Form that used to require constant correction is becoming default. The posterior tibial tendon work is showing up in my running posture. The glute activation is reducing lower back strain. The pieces are connecting.

I’ve also built out a fuller movement library, organized by body region, so you don’t have to figure out what to do when you identify a weak spot. I put it on a dedicated page you can bookmark and return to:

→ [The Healthy Body Workout Movement Library]

Bodyweight, bands, and light load. Seven regions. Up to three movements each. Use what you need, skip what you don’t, and let your body tell you how much it needs that day.

Still Building

One of the things I appreciate about revisiting my own material is that it keeps me honest. I’m not standing pat. The principles I wrote about months ago are the same principles — but I understand them better now because I’ve been living them under real load.

That’s the invitation here. Not to master the Healthy Body Workout and move on. But to keep returning to it, keep taking inventory, keep strengthening the weak knees.

The goal isn’t to recover from injury. The goal is to never need to.

Show Up. Do the Work.

You’ve started again. New program, new read the Bible in a year plan, maybe even a new set of running shoes. There’s energy in it — the clean feeling of a fresh beginning. You’re motivated. And for a while, it works. You get up early. You stick to the plan. You feel like you’re finally the man you’ve been meaning to become.

Then something happens. It always does. The alarm goes off and you don’t get up. One missed day becomes three. Before you know it, you’re right back where you started — maybe worse, because now you’ve got another failure to carry.

Sound familiar?

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I know it well. I started a 15-week training program for the Prairie on Fire backyard ultra coming in September. Week one was a banner week. I hit every beat, every run, and every workout. Week two, well, that was a different story — life happened, motivation faded, and I got plain old tired. I built a 15-week program because I knew that was coming. There was a time I’d be high on that week one, and low on that week two, and quitting by week three.

Now I know — week one is easy, week two is information, and week three is rededication.

Here’s what I want you to hear, because it took me a long time to understand it myself: the problem isn’t your willpower. It isn’t your program. It isn’t even your circumstances.

The problem is that you’ve been trying to change from the outside in.

We think if we can just pull in the right challenge or accomplishment — the right diet, the right workout, the right self-help framework, the right job — it’ll transform us. I thought fitness was going to change me. I was going to accomplish physical goals and somehow emerge as a different man on the inside. It didn’t work. It didn’t change me but revealed me. I needed to do the harder work first. The internal work.

And that change came through seeking the Lord.

This is what the Gardener & Warrior program is built on. Not on willpower or a brutal challenge. On the slow, faithful, countercultural work of a man who gets down in the dirt and tends to what’s actually growing in his own heart.

The Parable of the Sower isn’t a farming lesson.

In Luke 8, Jesus tells a story about seeds and soil. Some seeds fall on hardened paths. Some land on rock. Some get choked out by thorns. But some — some fall on good soil, and those seeds “bear fruit with steadfast endurance.”

That word “steadfast” matters. This isn’t a sprint. It’s not a 75-day challenge you survive and then walk away from unchanged. This is the life God has called you to — a life of patient, persistent, rooted formation.

The seed is the Word. The soil is your heart. And the question this program asks, week after week, is this: “What kind of soil are you?”

But we begin here. Right where you are.

Do not despise these small beginnings, for the LORD rejoices to see the work begin.

Zechariah 4:10

He rejoices. Not when you finish. Not when you succeed. He rejoices right now, as the work begins.

This week, there’s one question I want you to sit with: “What is actually keeping me from the life I say I want?”

Not the surface answer. Not the schedule or the job or the kids. Go deeper. What is the belief underneath the pattern? What are you avoiding? What are you afraid of?

You don’t have to share the answer with anyone. But you do have to be honest with yourself. A man who can’t first be honest with himself can’t be honest with anyone. Not even the Lord.

The garden is waiting. It’s time to pick up the shovel.

Start Here

Examine the soil of your heart. Put it on paper. Start it tomorrow morning. Before you reach for your phone, before you’ve spoken to anyone.

Write down three things you’re grateful for and one honest question you’re asking God today – then ask Him and listen. That’s it. Just that. The rest will come.

Next week, we talk about the one practice that holds everything else together.

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The Long Run

The unfinished business from weeks 1 and 2 got finished. 9.39 miles, 2 hours, in Arkansas summer heat. Besides the January half-marathon which blew up on me due to having mono, this is my biggest effort since last Prairie on Fire. The body protested twice — big HR spikes around 40 minutes and again at mile 7 — which makes complete sense. 40 minutes is about as far as I’d been running consistently. The body freaks out a little when you take it past its known territory. Both times it settled. Mile 9 was my third fastest of the run. That’s the aerobic base doing its job.

Quads were legitimately sore after. I’ll take that as a sign the mechanics are changing — the rehab work is redistributing load more correctly across the whole leg. Quads are supposed to be in the conversation.

Margin as a Training Variable

Week 3 is where I started thinking explicitly in terms of margin. Not just having enough energy for the workouts but architecting the day so execution is even possible. Prep work, communication, schedule protection — all of it became active training variables this week.

This lands at the same time my G&W cohort is in Week 10, sitting with the journal question: what do I need to subtract to create the margin I need? I’m doing the same audit in a different arena. Same operating system.

The busy man has life happening to him. Margin work is how you take that back.

One CNS

I tell my guys this regularly: there are many stressors in life, but only one CNS. This week I lived it. Upper body could handle more load. I held off anyway. The running load jumped significantly, and the whole system — not just the legs — needed to absorb it. Knowing when not to add is as important as knowing when to push.

The One Alarm Rule

Friday morning I broke it. Slept until I had to get up, which put me in reactive mode before my feet hit the floor. Almost talked myself out of the recovery run entirely. Instead, I applied what I teach: just commit to the warmup. That’s it. Ended up running 3 miles.

The One Alarm Rule isn’t really about the alarm. It’s about who’s driving. When you sleep until you have to get up, the day is already happening to you. The alarm — one alarm, no safety net — is a daily act of agency. For the full-plate man who feels like his life is running him, that one precommitment is a declaration that he is the agent, not the object.

Recovery is the Work

Woke up Saturday with a higher “Training Readiness” than Monday morning, after executing the full week. That’s the recovery architecture holding. Sleep rededication, electrolytes, the walk after the long run, the Sunday rehab session. The work only compounds if the absorption is protected.

Sunday morning, I did a full rehab and activation sequence before anything else. Short foot, glute bridge, side plank clamshell, dead bug, face pulls, adductor work, heel lowers, kickstand RDL. The whole chain.

After the long run my patellar tendonitis had flared up — not severe, but present, particularly on stairs. Manageable with activation and alignment, but there. After the Sunday rehab session, the legs came back to life. The soreness that had been sitting in my quads and knees cleared significantly. That’s not coincidence — that’s the rehab doing exactly what it’s designed to do. The work isn’t just injury prevention. It’s active recovery. It’s what keeps the system functional so tomorrow’s training is possible.

The body gave me honest feedback after 9.39 miles. The rehab protocol answered it.

I hit 26 miles this week. That's only the 5th time in my life I've run that many miles in a week. And I arrived at Saturday morning ready for a long run. That's not a coincidence — that's what a well-executed week looks like when the recovery infrastructure holds. We’re just getting started.

Week 3 in one line: Hit every rep. Didn’t max every rep. That’s exactly right for where we are in the block.

Today is a new week with its own work. Time to get back to work.

Simple. Doable. Compounding.

I watched from the sidelines.

And I'd be lying if I said something deeper didn't rise up in me. The desire to be in the arena. In the pain cave. In it with the brothers. That's not a casual want. That's something closer to hunger. That's what I'm built for.

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I sat with it. And I’ll be honest — I thought about it. Thought about breaking the programming, doing something big, my own version of training camp right here. Proving something. The hunger was that real.

But the program already has big efforts coming. Four-hour runs are in there. The big thing isn’t absent — it’s ahead. And the only way to be ready for it is to do the work that's in my hands.

And then I laced up my shoes and went for a short, slow run.

Because that’s where I am right now.

I want to be clear about something. What kept me from training camp wasn’t fitness. That community doesn’t work that way — one of the men at camp had knee surgery just weeks before and showed up fully accepted, exactly where he was. The door was open.

What kept me home was other work I’m doing. Unsexy work. Daily work. The kind of rebuilding that happens in multiple areas of life simultaneously — the kind that doesn’t make the highlight reel but determines whether you eventually get in the room.

I’m building the base. All of it. Not just the miles.

Right now that looks like kinetic chain rehab in the training. Posterior tibial tendon dysfunction — unglamorous, slow, and not particularly photogenic. Glute activations. Eccentric loading. Short miles at a pace that wouldn’t impress anyone.

And it looks like years of poor financial stewardship finally being rebuilt the right way. Different domain, same pattern. Daily decisions nobody sees, compounding slowly toward a different position.

Same foundation work. Same invisible rebar. Same unglamorous daily grind that determines whether everything built on top of it stands or falls.

But here’s what I know from building houses with my hands: you don’t skip the foundation because you’re eager to see the walls go up.

People photograph the concrete pour. They post the framing going up — walls taking shape, something finally visible. But nobody photographs the form setting. Nobody documents the rebar tying, the wall layouts, the compacted base that goes in the ground and disappears forever. The work that makes everything else possible is invisible by design — and it has to be done right, or everything built on top of it eventually fails.

The rehab is the foundation. The short slow miles are the framing. I’m not waiting to train. This is the training.

Here’s what I’ve learned about the missing.

I’ve been in this community three years. I’ve missed most of the big events. Every training camp, every meetup, every in-person moment where brothers did hard things together — watched from a distance.

It would be easy to make peace with the sidelines by lowering the ambition. Tell myself I’ll never make it to the big things. Settle into my circumstances and call it contentment.

That’s not what I’m doing.

The missing is fuel. Every training camp I don’t attend, every in-person event I watch from a distance — that goes into the work. The short slow miles aren’t just rehab. They’re me getting myself in position. The daily unsexy work across every area of my life is how I eventually get in the room.

I didn’t arrive at this mindset easily. I earned it by missing things I wanted and building anyway.

The men at camp didn’t get there by accident. They built their base. They did their unsexy work. They earned that weekend one ordinary day at a time. I’m doing the same thing. Just at a different mile marker on the same road.

I’ve watched this pattern long enough to trust it.

As a carpenter, the finished thing — the thing that stands and lasts — is the product of a hundred unsexy days nobody saw. Cuts and measurements and adjustments that never made it into any photo. That’s where the craft lives.

Same with coaching. The breakthroughs men have in the work I do don’t come from one powerful session. They come from the slow accumulation of honest work — showing up, doing the reps, building something real over time.

Simple. Doable. Compounding.

It’s the same pattern everywhere I look.

I’m a regular guy fitting this into an already full life. I work a 9-5. I’ve got a family, a ministry, a thousand projects. I don’t have five hours a day for training or content or optimization.

Fitness has to fit my life. I can’t fit my life to fitness. I already have a full life in motion.

That’s not an excuse. That’s the design constraint. And working within it, finding what’s simple, doable, and compounds over time, is the whole point.

The daily work that nobody sees. The slow miles. The foundation laid right.

That’s how a regular man goes 50+ miles.

Not never. Just not now.

That’s not a consolation. That’s not optimism. That’s a conviction forged by missing things I wanted and choosing to build anyway. Whether it’s in the training, in the finances, or in every area of life being rebuilt from the ground up.

My time will come. The base I’m building right now — in the rehab, in the slow miles, in the daily work nobody sees — that’s what will carry me when it does.

Build the base. Go the distance.

Sounds reasonable. Practical, even. Like asking how you can be a plumber without any pipes.

But sit with it a minute.

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What that question is actually saying is that the client is what makes me a coach. That the outcome confers the identity. Which means every empty week isn’t a slow week — it’s a verdict. Every “no” isn’t a miss — it’s a ruling on who you are.

That’s not a business problem. That’s a posture problem.

I could do carpentry the rest of my life and be content. Genuinely. I like the work. The wood, the problem-solving, the thing that wasn’t there and now is. If the coaching never becomes what I think it could be, I’ll still go to the job site Monday morning without bitterness.

That realization changed how I show up.

Because a man who leads from need — and I’ve been that man — leaks. It gets into everything. The way he pitches. The way he receives a “no.” The way he pushes past what someone actually needs because what he needs is to feel useful. Validated. Like he’s really doing the thing.

You can dress it up. Call it passion. Call it drive.

But the men you’re trying to serve can feel the difference between someone who needs them and someone who’s for them.

A man called to coach is a coach whether anyone shows up or not. The client doesn’t confer the identity. They receive the ministry.

I’m not pursuing this because I lack something. I’m not doing it to escape something. I’m doing it because I feel called to it, I’m good at it, and men need it.

That’s abundance. That’s the only stable ground to lead from.

So if you’re building anything — a practice, a marriage, a men’s group, a career — it’s worth asking:

Am I building from fullness or from empty?

The answer changes everything downstream.

As these things go, week one is almost always the best week. Motivation is high, the plan is fresh, and everything clicks. Week two is where you find out who you actually are.

Monday, my alarm went off at 4:30. I had every intention of getting up. I rolled over for just a moment — and woke up at 6:00. The irony isn’t lost on me. I had already written and scheduled The One Alarm Rule for Wednesday posting and was already talking to other men about it. And I failed it. Spectacularly.

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I got the run in that evening, stacked on top of the PM workout. But pushing training into the evening doesn’t just cost me — it costs my family their husband and father during the hours that belong to them. That’s a stewardship problem, not just a scheduling one. Lesson filed.

Tuesday I nailed it. Up at 4:30, great run with strides, client call at 6:30. Everything in its place. That evening, an unplanned work training class blew up the schedule. I got off the job site at 4:00, grabbed groceries, got home at 5:00, changed, hit three out of four movements in the home gym, showered, and was out the door by 5:45. Sometimes execution just looks like refusing to let the moment of action become a moment of decision.

Wednesday was a rest day, and I needed every bit of it. I skipped the rehab work I should have done. That evening I didn’t want to go to church. I went anyway. Then stayed up too late. Again.

Here’s the thing about week two that I didn’t fully anticipate: sleep was the real enemy. Not the workouts, not the schedule. Every late night compounded the next day. Coffee at the wrong hour, a class running long, one more thing before bed — it added up quietly until it wasn’t quiet anymore.

Thursday the alarm held and the run was genuinely great. My body was functioning the way it’s supposed to — kinetic chain firing, pace fast, heart rate low. I averaged 9:47 per mile with a 131 bpm average heart rate. For context, that pace used to be a working effort. Thursday morning it was a good time. That evening I missed the second run of a double day for the second half of the work class. Drank coffee during it. Couldn’t sleep when I got home. Surprise.

Friday, everything caught up with me. I woke up on time and did nothing. That was the theme for the whole day. Some days the body just sends the invoice.

Saturday I made a decision I’d been circling all week. I’m heading into a serious training block for the Prairie on Fire backyard ultra in September — a race where competitors run a 4.167-mile loop every hour until only one person is left standing. I ran 42 miles there last year. From here to race day, there’s no margin for alcohol. So Saturday felt like a closing of a door. I did some day drinking while working on projects around the house, discovered why people warn you about Twisted Teas, and went a little further than I intended. Called it an early evening. Did not do the Saturday long run.

Sunday I slept until 6:00, which mostly offset Saturday. And then I got back to work. Upper body and core in the morning. An easy recovery run after church. Stretching, rehab work, meal prep, and two weeks of electrolyte mixes in the evening.

The longer I do this, the more I believe that getting back on the horse is its own skill — maybe the most important one. It doesn’t feel heroic. It just feels like Sunday evening and a choice to be ready for Monday.

The good news is that the first two weeks of this program are designed as a tune-up. They exist to show you how the training fits your life before the real work begins. I learned more from week two than I did from week one. Week one tells you what’s possible. Week two tells you the truth.

The only unclaimed hour was before all of it started.

Early mornings.

He was struggling to get up, so he did what most men do. Set more alarms. Three, four — enough to make sure he didn’t sleep through.

My first instruction to him had nothing to do with fitness.

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Most men think more alarms means more commitment.

It doesn’t.

It means you’ve already negotiated with yourself before the alarm ever goes off. Somewhere the night before, part of you accepted that the first alarm might not be enough. That you might need an out.

You built the exit before you needed it.

And here’s what that costs you — you’ve turned the moment of action into a moment of decision.

The alarm goes off. Now what? Now you decide. Hit snooze or get up. Check the time, check how you feel, weigh your options. At 5am. Half asleep. Against the warmest, most comfortable version of your bed.

You will lose that fight more than you win it.

The problem was never willpower. The problem was commitment.

Multiple alarms isn’t preparation. It’s hedging. You haven’t fully decided — and the alarm going off just surfaces what was already true.

Set one alarm.

Will you miss it? Maybe. That’s the point. Consequences are great teachers — don’t arrange your life to avoid them. If you sleep through it, you’ll know to make adjustments. And you can decide what those are.

Here’s what I noticed this morning when I hit snooze myself.

I was training.

Not for fitness. I was training my response to resistance. Every time the alarm goes off and you roll over, you are practicing retreat. Grooving it in. Making it more natural for next time.

It’s not just alarms. It’s the next episode when you should be in bed. The second helping. The hard conversation you keep scheduling for later. Every moment you face something you don’t want to do — or have to stop something you do — is a training rep.

Everything is training. The question is what you’re building.

This is where it gets deeper than productivity.

The old man — the version of you that operated on fear, comfort, and avoidance — he doesn’t leave quietly. He knows your weak spots because he built them. He knows exactly when to whisper and exactly what to say.

And if you’ve left him an exit, he’ll use it.

Multiple alarms isn’t just hedging. It’s building doors for an enemy who already knows the floor plan.

The new man doesn’t negotiate with him. He doesn’t engage the argument at 5am about whether he’s tired enough to deserve the snooze. He already decided. The alarm is just the bell.

Here’s the truth about the old man — he’s a punk. Convincing, maybe loud, but the moment you stop engaging and just move, he folds. He has no actual authority. He’s a squatter.

But you have to stop building him exits.

So here’s the rule.

One alarm.

Not because you’re tougher than other men. Not because you don’t need sleep. Because you’ve already decided. The alarm isn’t a suggestion. It’s a bell. And when it rings, the fight is already over — you just have to show up for the outcome you already chose.

Then ask yourself the harder question.

Where else have you left yourself an exit?

The second alarm is just the most obvious one. Where else have you built doors for retreat? What moments of action have you turned into moments of decision — at the worst possible time, when you’re least equipped to win?

The snooze button is training. So is every other exit you’ve left yourself.

Close them.

My client with two jobs, a farm, and a family — he set one alarm.

He got up.

Not every morning perfectly. But he stopped negotiating with himself in the dark. He told himself the same thing he’d said a thousand mornings before — time to go to work. Only this time, the work was the workout.

That’s not a fitness story. That’s an identity story.

You already know how to show up for what’s required of you. You’ve proven it a thousand times — for work, for your family, for everything with consequences attached.

This is just applying that same commitment to yourself.

One alarm. No exits.

Show up. Do the work.

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Last year I was sharing my “This Week in Training,” as I was preparing for the Prairie on Fire backyard ultra. That's the training I'm back in. It’s now less than 14 weeks away (96 days), so not yet time for the specific training block, but close enough to be real and to get ready.

I’m in better position this year than I was last year. Last year I was injured when I took on the challenge in January, so I had rehab and training. This year I have some problems, but not nearly as serious, though it still includes some rehab.

Last week was week 1 of my new program to prepare, rehab, and train. I have two weeks of this prep/ rehab work before really getting into the main training. I’ve known of these weaknesses for months, but I’ve been inconsistent in addressing them. So, I sat down and developed a full and scheduled program — a 15-week phased block built around three priorities: rebuild the kinetic chain from the ground up, develop the running fitness for 50+ miles, and train the whole system to hold together when it matters. The programming allowed me to focus on execution, which is what I needed.

The Goal

I built this program with 15 weeks to race day, September 12th. Last year my goal was at least 31 miles, and I ran 42, or 10 yards/ laps. This year I’m holding the goal more loosely, but I’m looking for 50 miles, or 12 laps, with at least one lap in the dark.

I entered 2026 with the fitness mantra of “build the base, go the distance.” That is the purpose of this program. In a very real sense, the rehab work is primary over the running training. Last year’s race ended when my body broke exactly where I knew it would. It wasn’t a cardio failure or exhaustion, but weak areas that broke.

Week One

I thought I had an Achilles tendon problem, even before I ran the backyard ultra last year. I had pain in my heel, and that’s where the Achilles is, right? After the backyard ultra that pain was worse. I notice, however, when the pain came up while I was walking, I was able to make it go away by pressing and engaging my big toe while I walked. Eventually, I sought help with the problem, and he was able to quickly realize it wasn’t my Achilles tendon, but the posterior tibial tendon. I didn’t even know that was a thing, which reminded me — you don’t know what you don’t know.

I have also been dealing with weakness in my hips and abdominal floor, patellar tendonitis, tight hips, and not engaging my glutes. Turns out, all of that is related, and it starts at the bottom, at my foot. The focus of week one became repatterning the response of the whole lower kinetic chain. Simple work, if you have a plan. The results of week one has confirmed the problem, the fix, and that I am not injured, just weak and out of alignment.

Every run and every workout starts with waking up the kinetic chain from the ground up by activating the big toe and arch, waking up the glutes, and engaging the core. Simple movements with big results. Further, I make sure to engage the whole chain, beginning with the big toe, while I’m walking. That makes every step a rep in the chain activation and repatterning. 10,000 steps becomes 10,000 reps!

The Work

I’m using the same basic workout schedule that worked so well for me last year, which I initially learned from :

Monday: AM run, PM workout

Tuesday: AM run with speed work, PM workout

Wednesday: Active rest with focused rehab

Thursday: Double run day. Gotta train the legs to run tired.

Friday: Easy AM run, PM workout

Saturday: Long Run

Sunday: AM workout, PM ruck/ walk, flex into an active rest day as needed.

That’s the plan. Here’s how week one actually broke out. Hey, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. It wasn’t perfect, but it was really good work.

Monday: first run with the chain sequence. Felt the big toe activation for the first time while running.

Tuesday: speed work. 9:25 tempo didn’t feel fast. Legs responding differently already.

Wednesday: moved the PM workout here. Smart adjustment, not failure. The plan serves the training.

Thursday: double day. HR spike at mile 1 PM run. Managed it. 5.16 miles total.

Friday: recovery run. Caught the waist bend in real time. Self-corrected mid-run. Chain awareness arriving.

Saturday: long run shortened. 4:30 didn’t hold. Lesson logged.

Sunday: workout + ruck. Pallof press hitting pelvic floor weakness. The quiet work doing its job.

The Headline Data

Between my runs, rucks, and walks I surpassed 23 miles. That was a big increase and a big win, especially since my body held up well. The biggest problem I’ve been dealing with, the patellar tendonitis, didn’t even show up to any significant degree, just by working on the kinetic chain. The post-tib tendon is responding well and starting to feel strong. I managed a week of consistent movement, averaging almost 15k steps per day. More important than the step average, though, was I stacked 7 consecutive days of over 12k steps. No dud days. I’m not where I’d want to be, but I’m not nearly as far behind as I feared. All I have to do is keep showing up and doing the work.

What I Learned

Week one was a big week. I learned a lot about where I am, and I know what I have to do to be where I want to be. First thing I learned is a coach needs structure about as much as a client. It much easier to execute a plan, than to decide what you’re doing every day. Programming doesn’t remove the hard work. It removes the decision about what to do every day.

I was reminded a good morning starts the night before.

Every step is a rep, if you’re paying attention.

Restriction is the body being honest about capacity. Load it progressively and it adapts faster than you think. However, you have to start with honesty about where you are.

Last year I went 42 miles on a broken chain running on cardio and will. The chain gave out at yard 10. The cardio still had gas.

This week the chain held through a tempo run, a double day, a recovery run on tired legs, and a Sunday ruck. The knee that was my primary concern never showed up once.

Not broken. Just weak and out of alignment.

Week 2 starts today and I know exactly what to do.

Show up. Do the work.

In Part 1, I started this series telling you that physical fitness mattered and is an expression of faith — an act of worship. I meant it. What you do with the body matters. What you do in the body matters. The body is the site of spiritual formation.

I didn’t arrive at that conviction all at once. It was progressive revelation.

It started with the Incarnation. God didn’t save us from a distance; He took on flesh. The body wasn’t incidental to the story of redemption. It was central to it. That conviction settled into me and changed the way I understood what the body was for.

Paul names the practical implication in Romans 12:1 — present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Not your mind. Not your intentions. Your body. The body presented, offered, given over, that is the worship. That’s not metaphor. That’s instruction.

So that’s what I did. I took that verse into the gym. Into the runs. Into the training. This is an act of worship. This body, offered. And something started shifting but not dramatically or all at once. Cumulatively. The workouts that had been about performance, or punishment, or proving something started becoming something else. The direction of it changed.

I began to notice that the hard physical work was clearing something. Not just stress, not just mental noise but something deeper. The effort created a space that wasn’t available any other way. And in that space, things surfaced. Honest things. Things I hadn’t been willing to sit with in the ordinary run of the day.

The body, rightly used, was doing something to my soul. Not metaphorically. Actually.

The language for what that was came later, on a bad half marathon that most men would have quit and nobody would have blamed them for quitting. Slow, struggling, alone on a road at 4am with nobody watching and nothing worth posting. And in that stripped-down state — in that space the hard work had cleared — the question surfaced that changed everything.

Who am I doing this for?

That question didn’t come from my mind. It came up from somewhere the effort had made accessible. And the answer that followed — the recognition that I had been running from something instead of toward something — that was the soul finding its true orientation. Not because I had thought my way there. Because the body had put me somewhere the mind alone never could.

That’s the tuning mechanism. Right use of the body actually orients the soul toward God. It creates conditions the mind cannot manufacture. It puts you somewhere honest. And in that honest place, the soul finds the direction it was made for.

I dedicated myself to fitness because it honored God with my body; the body He had given me and Jesus had redeemed. I found doing workouts and runs as worship oriented me toward God and connected me with God. I also found the type of training wasn't neutral — different practices develop different things, and I started choosing my training with that in mind.

I’ve always loved lifting. My body loves lifting and responds well to it. What I never loved, and in fact hated, was running and definitely never considered long running. I wanted to get it done, to bang it out — like lifting. The momentary pain or suffering didn’t bother me. I noticed the way I lived life reflected this. I needed endurance. I needed to develop the virtue of endurance.

That’s why I got into endurance running.

You can only develop virtue by doing the thing that demands it from you. Doing easy things cannot develop virtue — it can only express what’s already there. I didn’t need more lifting. Lifting was already mine. I needed the thing that would demand from me what I didn’t yet have.

I had the character of enduring short periods of testing. I could handle a brief test, but what I found in myself, was a lack of enduring over a longer season of testing without giving way. I was starting and stopping too often — even if I continued the arc overall. I needed to persevere all the way through to the end, especially when I didn’t know where that end was.

In order to endure the training, to persevere in the long runs, I developed two particular skills. Micro goals and following the first good impulse when the testing came. At mile 8 of a half marathon, instead of thinking “I have 5 more miles to go,” I would think about the next mile or half mile or even quarter mile. When I reached that goal the question of “do I go on?” comes, and my first impulse is “yes,” but the option of “no” is still there. I found I needed to quickly accept the “yes” before the “no” got its argument, because under that load thoughts quickly spiral into doubt, and doubt, once birthed, becomes a pounding drum in my head.

My carpentry job proved it transferred. When you’re building 20 drawers for a cabinet, all 20 require the same accuracy and quality of work, especially when you’re getting paid. I have to finish the 20th drawer just as well as the first drawer, one drawer at a time.

I started this journey thinking what most men think — that the body was an obstacle to my spiritual life. Something to be managed, subdued, kept in its place so the real work of faith could happen somewhere above it. I was wrong. I found the body to be the training ground of my spiritual life — not the obstacle to it.

I found my spiritual formation was incomplete without right use of the body. Not because the body is more important than the soul, but because they are not as separate as I had been treating them. Right use of the body is part of the formation. It was the part I had been leaving out.

I started this series emphasizing Jesus came as the full human being and, through his birth, life, death, and resurrection redeemed the full human being. Mind, body, spirit, and soul — all of it.

What that means is the Christian life isn’t just intellectual or spiritual. The Christian life includes the whole human being. And the Christian life is formation, including the body. What would it mean to include your body into your faith? Paul told us in Romans 12:1

1And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him.

Next time you work out, dedicate it as worship. Offer your body before you begin. That's not a ritual — that's Romans 12:1 lived in the ordinary Tuesday morning. Start there.

Leave out the music. Take out the earbuds. Find a quiet space. Let your workout open with prayer and let it be worship.

You know what the training is for. You know why it matters. The question now is how to sustain it — not just when the motivation is high, but through every season, for the long game.

Next: Part 9 — The Long Game.

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Declassified UAP footage and congressional hearings on non-human intelligence. Identitarian movements fracturing every institution they touch — political, cultural, ecclesial. Wars that don’t end. Economies that don’t stabilize. A global sense that the categories we used to navigate reality are no longer holding.

I’m not going to tell you none of that matters. It does. Some of it matters enormously. The questions being raised are real questions, and dismissing them with a wave of the hand is not faith, it’s avoidance dressed up as confidence.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: none of it is load-bearing.

The foundation was never resting on those answers.

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Jesus told a story about two builders. Both of them heard the same words. Both of them went and built something. Both of them finished. And for a while — probably a long while — both houses stood fine.

The difference wasn’t visible in favorable conditions. It only became visible when the storm came. The rain fell and the floods rose and the winds blew, and one house fell and the other didn’t. Not because of what was in the houses. Because of what was underneath them.

The storm isn’t the enemy in this story. The storm is the revealer.

What it reveals is simple: what are you actually standing on?

Not what you believe in theory. Not what you’d say if someone asked. What’s the ground under your feet when the categories start shifting and the noise gets loud and the thing you didn’t expect to shake starts to shake?

That’s the question I want to sit with you in for a few minutes. Because I’ve had to answer it for myself, and the answer surprised me.

I didn’t come to faith through a tradition. There was no church in my background, no inherited framework, no family language for any of this.

What I had was my father, who taught me to ask why. Not as a challenge — as a way of understanding. He gave me intellectual humility and a right posture toward legitimate authority before I had words for either of those things. That formation preceded my faith and, I believe, made it possible. I didn’t know it at the time. I know it now.

What I had after that was the Marine Corps. The Corps gave me mission — something bigger than myself, something worth giving myself to completely. I believed in it the way young men believe in things when they’re all in. The ideals were real. The brotherhood was real. The Eagle, Globe, and Anchor meant something.

But human institutions have a ceiling. They eventually fail the people who give themselves to them. Not because they’re evil. Because they’re human. And I was built for something that wasn’t.

Then I found Jesus. Not the institutional version but the man in the Gospels. And I recognized something in him that none of those previous foundations had.

He spoke truly. He lived consistently. He saw it through to the end without flinching, without negotiating, without protecting himself when he could have. This was the man I’d been looking for my whole life. The man worth following. The man worth building on.

Hebrews 12 calls him the pioneer and perfecter of faith. The one who went first. Who endured. Who held.

I believed in him completely.

But I have to be honest with you, because honesty is the only thing that makes any of this useful: the resurrection was a hurdle I couldn’t jump. I believed in the man. I couldn’t get myself across the miracle claim. That’s where I was. I trusted the witness of the Gospels but was unable to believe the central thing the Gospels are about.

Here’s what happened next.

The man I already trusted told me the next step. In Matthew 7, Jesus says: ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you.

I didn’t have to trust God yet. I trusted Jesus’ word about God. That was enough to take the next step.

Around the same time, a coworker who pointed me to Jeremiah 33:3. I didn’t find it myself — it came through someone else, which I’ve since come to understand as the way God tends to move before we’ve acknowledged Him, and was a prophetic word. The verse is simple:

Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.

That sounded like a promise.

I had come to the end of my own capacity to figure this out. I didn’t know if God was real. I wasn’t sure the Bible was true. But I made a simple reckoning: if He is real, if this is true, He will answer. That’s what it says. So I humbled myself — because it’s clear throughout Scripture that God answers, but humility is His term — and I prayed toward a God I wasn’t certain was there.

He answered.

I’m not going to try to dress that up or make it more dramatic than it was or explain the mechanics of it. He answered. That’s the testimony. That’s the foundation. Not the theology I’ve built since, not the framework I’ve developed, not the questions I’ve resolved or haven’t. The encounter itself is the ground.

2 Corinthians 1:20 says that all the promises of God find their Yes in Christ Jesus. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God.

What I did — believed in the man, prayed the promise, received the Yes — that’s what that verse looks like lived out. It’s not complicated. It’s not reserved for people with the right background or the right theological vocabulary or the right amount of faith. It’s a sequence available to anyone willing to humble themselves enough to try it.

Believe in the man. Pray the promise. Receive the Yes.

I recently read Psalm 118, and I want to share something with you.

This movement I experienced is not new. I didn’t know it at the time. But it was already written.

Open to me the gates of righteousness; I will enter through them and give thanks to the Lord.

That’s a man at the end of his rope, asking to enter. Not demanding. Not negotiating. Asking.

The Lord answered me and became my salvation.

There it is. The Jeremiah 33:3 moment, written three thousand years before I prayed it.

The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes. This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

The stone the world passed over. The one who didn’t fit the framework. The one who was tested at the absolute limit of what a human being can endure — rejected, killed, buried — and proven by God on the other side of it.

This is the Lord’s doing.

Not my interpretation of it. Not my theological framework around it. His doing. And the only response the psalmist can find is marvel.

That’s still my response. I’ve been a student of this faith for years now, a teacher and a coach and a writer in this space, and the thing that hasn’t changed is the marvel. The encounter is still the ground. Everything I’ve built since is built on top of it, not instead of it.

Here’s what I want to say to you directly, whoever you are reading this in whatever moment you’re in.

The noise is real. The questions are real. The shaking is real.

But the foundation is not your interpretation of current events. It’s not your eschatological framework or your political theology or your position on non-human intelligence. It’s not how well you’ve resolved the hard questions or how coherent your worldview is or how long you’ve been in the faith.

The foundation is Him, Jesus Christ.

And he doesn’t move when the categories shift.

I speak with confidence — in my writing, in my coaching, in my teaching — not because I’ve resolved everything or have no questions. There is plenty in the “not yet” for me. But the confidence doesn’t come from resolution. It comes from the one who answered when I called. He is the same one now. The unresolved sits inside the settled encounter, not the other way around.

When everything around me is shaken, I’ve never been more glad that my hope is not in man.

The rock holds.

Build there.

Two people. Same house. Same bed. Same calendar. But somewhere along the way the choosing stopped — not in a fight, not in a betrayal, just in a thousand small moments where presence gave way to distraction and intentionality gave way to autopathy.

I’ve been co-leading a family Bible study at my church for about a year now. We’ve had couples in that room at every stage — newlyweds finding their footing, seasoned marriages that have weathered real storms, and some quietly hanging on by a thread. What I’ve noticed isn’t that married people don’t love each other. It’s that they’ve stopped showing up for each other. And because nobody’s in crisis, nobody sounds the alarm.

That’s the marriage nobody’s trying to save. And it’s the one most likely to drift beyond reach.

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What We Got Wrong About Marriage Instructions

Here’s an opinion I’ll put my name on: the single most counterproductive thing a Christian spouse can do is read the marriage passages in Paul and immediately start thinking about whether their partner is fulfilling their role.

I’ve seen it wreck couples who genuinely love each other. He reads Ephesians 5 and decides she needs to be more submissive. She reads it and decides he needs to step up as a leader. Both of them are looking across the table. Nobody’s looking in the mirror.

The instructions aren’t surveillance tools. They’re invitations. And the only invitation you can actually accept is the one with your name on it.

This isn’t just practical wisdom — it’s theologically grounded. When you take your role seriously, not as leverage but as calling, something happens. You stop waiting for the other person to change. And in my experience — both personal and in the men I’ve walked with — when one partner genuinely begins to show up, the other almost always moves toward them. Not because they were convinced. Because the environment changed.

Posture is contagious. So is drift.

I’ll say it plainly from my own marriage: when I act like the man described in Ephesians 5, my wife begins acting like the woman described. There is a natural orientation of man and woman in that passage — one that feeds the other. I am the leader. Leaders go first.

The Theology Underneath This

I want to say something that might sound strange: I don’t think the Ephesians 5 household codes are our destination. I think Eden is.

The creation account gives us the original design — ezer kenegdo, a helper who is the counterpart, a genuine equal standing face to face. That’s the pre-fall picture. The hierarchical arrangements that came after? Those are a result of the curse, not the blueprint. “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” — that’s not a prescription. That’s a diagnosis.

In Christ, the curse is broken. Our ontological status is no longer defined by what happened between Eden and Calvary. Paul’s words to Christian couples aren’t an endorsement of curse-shaped marriage — they’re pastoral instructions for navigating a fallen world while pointing toward something better. They’re useful. They’re not our ceiling.

The proper orientation of the Christian couple is a return to what God intended before everything went wrong. Mutuality. Full presence. Two image-bearers choosing each other — not out of obligation, not out of hierarchy, but because that’s what love actually does.

That’s what Come Back to Me is built on.

One Week. One Thing a Day.

My wife Samantha has been a partner in this from the beginning — including being the first to walk through it. What we built is simple by design, because simple is what actually gets done.

Seven days. One small, doable act per day. Touch and gratitude. Presence. Prayer. A shared meal. The Word. Worship. And on Sunday — walking into the house of God together, as one, with the Lord already in the room before you arrive.

Each day builds on the one before. By the end of the week you haven’t completed a program — you’ve built a rhythm. And rhythms, compounded over time, become a marriage.

No weekend retreat required. No difficult conversation as a prerequisite. No therapist on standby. Just two people deciding — one day at a time — to close the gap.

It’s Free. It’s Yours.

Come Back to Me is available now at rdpcoaching.com, no cost, no email, just one-click download.

If your marriage is drifting, this is a gentle on-ramp back. If your marriage is good, this makes it better. If you’re leading a small group, a Sunday school class, a couples’ Bible study — pass it along. Print it out. Work through it together.

One week. Come back to each other.

Show up. Do the work.

It’s the source of temptation. The thing that has to be disciplined, subdued, beaten into submission. Paul says he beats his body and makes it his slave. We read that and we think: yes, that’s the posture. The body is the enemy. Spirit wins. Body loses.

But I think we’ve been getting this wrong. And I think it’s costing us.

Here’s the reframe I want to offer: your body is not your enemy. It’s your follower. And the way a Christian leads — the only way Jesus taught us to lead — is through servant leadership.

Jesus was direct about this. He said the pagan rulers lord it over their subjects and call it benevolence. But not so with you. The first among you must be the servant of everyone else. He flipped the entire model of leadership — from domination and control to service and care.

I think He meant the body too.

We are not at war with our bodies. We are called to lead them. And we lead them the way Christ taught us to lead anything — with servant leadership. Not boxing them into submission. Not treating them as adversaries to be overcome. Leading them. Caring for them. Listening to them.

Which brings me to the justice claim.

A couple of months ago, I was in the middle of run training. I was struggling — and instead of doing what most men do, which is tell themselves to push harder or stop being soft, I tried something different.

I started coaching my body.

That’s all I thought I was doing at first. I was speaking to it the way I’d speak to a client I was encouraging through a race. We’re in this together. We’re doing this for our own good. We’re going to be better for it. Servant leadership applied not to people, but to the body itself.

What I didn’t realize — not yet — was that I was also doing a form of somatic therapy. I was staying present with my body in the hard thing instead of checking out. And there’s something important about that: the training run is a chosen hard thing. You can stop at any time. The cost of stopping is low. Which means it’s a safe environment to practice presence — to build the relational capacity, to develop the trust, without the stakes being catastrophic if you’re not there yet.

I was building something I didn’t have a name for yet.

Over time, as that practice deepened, I started calling it relational presence — the practice of being genuinely present with your body, in relationship with it rather than in opposition to it, in the same way you might be present with another person you’re walking alongside.

And it was out of that relational presence — that built trust, that sustained attention, that refusal to abandon the body in the hard moments — that the justice claim finally arrived.

My body filed a justice claim against me. About the smoking.

It didn’t arrive as chaos or breakdown. It arrived clearly, because the relationship had made clarity possible. I use that language deliberately — justice claim — because what struck me was that my body was right. It was the righteous actor. It had been carrying the weight of a contradiction I’d been managing around, and it finally called the account due in a moment when I was present enough to actually hear it.

We tend to think of the body’s signals as weakness, as temptation, as the flesh that needs to be subdued. But what if some of those signals are your body being a faithful witness? What if it’s not rebelling — it’s reporting?

There’s another dimension to this that I didn’t fully understand until I started doing the work.

When something traumatic happens, the mind has an exit. It dissociates, compartmentalizes, checks out. It has to — sometimes it genuinely cannot handle what’s happening, and that response is a mercy.

But the body has no exit. It stays in the room. It holds the weight. It lives inside what happened, stores it in tissue and nerve and response patterns, and waits.

So when something years later triggers that old wound, the body recognizes it immediately. The body was there. The mind — which left — may not recognize it at all. The mind says why am I reacting like this? This isn’t a big deal. The body says I remember exactly what this is.

The body isn’t confused. You are.

That gap between the body’s memory and the mind’s confusion is where so many men get stuck. The body isn’t overreacting. It’s reporting accurately from an experience the mind never fully processed.

What the body needs, in those moments, is not to be overridden. It needs to be led. It needs the mind and spirit to come back to the room, to be present, to say — I hear you. I’m here now.

That’s servant leadership of the body. That’s what it looks like in practice.

I taught this live on a recent coaching call — not what I’d prepared but what the men needed, out of my own experience with running, with somatic therapy, and with a few specific situations that pushed everything I’d been building to its limit. One of those situations involved a very real physical threat — the kind you can’t stop, can’t walk away from, can’t manage from a distance. And what I found is that all of the prior work — the runs, the slow process of learning to stay present in the body rather than abandoning it, the relational presence built in a thousand small chosen hard things — had prepared me to remain grounded in a moment that would have previously sent me somewhere else entirely.

You don’t build that capacity in the crisis. You build it in the training. And then the crisis reveals what you built.

The video below is that teaching, raw and unedited. It includes a real conversation with two men I coach, one of whom asks a question mid-teaching that sharpens the whole thing. I’m sharing it because it came out of something real, and because I think the realness of it is part of what makes it worth watching.

The body isn’t your enemy.

It’s been holding things you haven’t come back for yet.

And it has a claim against you — not to condemn you, but because it’s been waiting for you to lead it the way Christ called you to lead: not by force, but by service.

Ronald D. Potts is a faith-based coach and the creator of Gardener and Warrior, a 12-week program for Christian men. Find out more at rdpcoaching.com