West Point graded it. Ranger School and Selection graded it harder. There was always a standard, always a number, and always somebody writing it down.
I left active duty on 29 June 2023 with a real aerobic base underneath me — years of four-to-seven mile runs, ruck marches, a national championship, two schools that measure you when you are too tired to perform. Then I stopped. Not dramatically. Business school happened, pickleball happened, an apartment gym happened. Two and a half years went by without a single structured mile.
It wasn't laziness. It was the absence of a scoreboard — the same thing that happens to almost every man in his early thirties who used to be an athlete. Nobody tells you you've slipped. You just quietly stop finding out.
In January 2026 I started CrossFit again. A month later I ran my first HYROX in Miami and got the number back: 1:12:43, 161st out of 1,463, on no structured run training in two and a half years.
The breakdown was the useful part. My transitions were top 11.8% of the field. My running was top 20.1% — and it was the single reason I wasn't in the top fifty. One test, and I knew exactly which thing to fix. That is all a good test has to do.
So I went and fixed it, and found out somewhere in the middle that I actually like running now. Which is how a man who spent a decade avoiding anything longer than four miles ends up signed up for a marathon and a full Ironman in the same season, with a coach and a testing protocol for the first time in his adult life.
This site is the scoreboard I rebuilt for myself, in public. Every number goes up whether it flatters me or not — the sessions that go badly included, because those are the ones that actually tell you something.
The plans exist for the same reason. The benchmark I use to find my own weak link is free, because knowing which number is holding you back is worth more than anything I could sell you. If you were fit at 24 and you're wondering what's still available at 33, that's who this is being documented for.
The record
