Published on Mon Dec 01 2025 16:17:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) by Anuj Jain

The Setting

Till the age of ~30, my defining physical characteristic was one of scrawniness. For more than a decade, I have been working on fixing that by regularly hitting the gym, watching my diet and playing some sports. While this improved my physical appearance, my one Achilles’ heel remained - All my life, I have been a poor runner. I read somewhere about how the latest LLMs can actually act like pretty awesome fitness coaches, and decided to try it out.

The first prompt

I am relatively fit, and I hit the gym 3-4 times a week. I do weight training and some relatively light cardio (elliptical, stationary bike and walking on a treadmill). I have never been able to take to running, but I would really like to start. Instead of making a long plan, I want you to just give me something to do today, and I’ll come back and report the results and then we can keep progressing day by day. Cool?

And we were off to the races interval running!

The first run (22 Jul, 2025)

Overall Run Stats	Heart Rate Stats

It was a simple plan - alternate between 2 minutes of easy jogging and 1.5 minutes of walking, and repeat 6x. Doesn’t look like much, but it definitely felt like a lot!

The last run (1 Dec, 2025)

Overall Run Stats	Heart Rate Stats

Surprisingly, I still had some gas left in the tank after I finished this last run. Could’ve probably done 10 km! Will cross that milestone soon hopefully!

Written by Anuj Jain