We’ve all been there. You get up early every day, hit the trail, try to maintain the right diet, pray to the owl god Moloch for stamina in your legs, but you can’t seem to run any farther or any faster than you did yesterday! This article has some helpful tips that are guaranteed to get you running up to twelve times further than you ever have before. You can get started today!!

1. Get a Partner

The first tip is one that might surprise you. Exercising with a partner can help you in so many ways. An accountability partner keeps you committed to your program, gives you someone with whom you can share your frustrations or difficulties!!! If you manage to run with someone who is at or near the same fitness level as you, then you can challenge each other and push each other whilst running together. You’d be surprised how much you have left in the tank when you are competing against someone else. You’ll also be surprised how fast a bond can grow between two people exercising together regularly. A special and unspoken pact can develop under those conditions!!!!

2. Stop Bringing That Old Dishwasher with You on Your Run

One thing most runners don’t think about is how heavy a dishwasher is. They can be upwards of one hundred extra pounds of steel and electrical equipment. There is no reason to bring an old dishwasher with you on your run. Even if you have your old dishwasher on wheels, it can still add unnecessary friction and a difficult obstacle to your workout. So ditch that old dishwasher and see how much farther you can go!!!!! As an added bonus you’ll probably also shave minutes off your mile time.

3. Don’t Run Into The Wind

An old adage states that running into the wind slows you down more than the wind at your back speeds you up. While this may or may not be verifiably true, the fact remains that running into the wind can be miserable. It has cut short many a run and can make you think twice about your training methods. To avoid the wind, try to avoid running on days that are extra windy, or if you can’t re-arrange your schedule around the weather, try planning your route so as to avoid running directly into the wind. Perhaps one day the globalists will share their weather controlling technology with the world!!!!!! Until that day, you are stuck just trying to avoid the wind, rather than attempting to govern it.

4. Have Your Legs Replaced with Cybernetic Parts at a Secret Illuminati Surgical Facility

This surgery is common for the elites and the lizard people who rule and control our world, but how can someone like you get access to this wonderful technology? It’s not as hard as you might think. Most towns have an Illuminati Headquarters, a Masonic temple, or a participating Applebee’s where these kinds of operations are carried out regularly. You’ll have to break into the facility at night, so you’ll need a gun.

You’ll have to make contacts in the black market and the underworld because you don’t want to legally purchase a firearm. You don’t want to have to go through the hassle of acquiring the weapon through standard means and then falsifying a police report, saying the gun is lost because even that might not remove suspicion from you. It could intensify it. The best bet is to get a weapon with no history and no serial numbers!!!!!!!

You’ll have to involve your training partner, of course. If you’ve developed the kind of bond that develops between most athletes who train together—having them and their family over for dinner, knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each other’s bodies, revealing to each other while you train the great fears and desires you have, sharing more than you’ve ever shared with anyone—they’ll help you. You can start with suggesting that you’ll need them to watch your back and see if that gets them involved and then you can convince them that they too need to replace their legs with cybernetic appendages.

Under cover of the 3AM darkness you’ll drive over to that Applebee’s with the secret operating facility in the basement. You’ll be wearing ski masks and tactical gear. You won’t talk much because you’ll both be trying to wrestle with the fear in your gut. You’ll park the car and sit and stare at the facility for a long time, thinking about how far you’ve come, how it all started by getting that running app and thinking you might sign up for a 5k. That was a long time ago.

You’ll have to kill or incapacitate the guards!!!!!!! It’s preferable to kill them so they don’t cause problems later on. You and your partner will realize at this moment that you have crossed some kind of threshold and there is no coming back. You will look each other in the faces and know that this is something you won’t be able to escape from, that for the rest of your lives the sound those men make when they die will haunt your dreams. With that existential unease will come the fear that accompanies phone calls from unknown numbers—even the phrase itself will send you into a dread spiral. Loud bangs will startle you. Seeing police cars will convince you they’ve caught on. But how else will you duodecuple your distance while also reducing your average per mile time? It’s not like you are going to take steroids.

Once you get into the inner sanctum of the facility, the scientist who performs the surgeries will be operating on someone!!!!!!! It will be someone you recognize, some celebrity from a show you know or perhaps some state senator you once voted for, maybe even that former athlete who does commercials for a local car dealership, linking your town to the world at large, a former ring-wearing world champion for a professional sports team in your very town, shaking hands with the local business owner who sold you your Toyota.

You and your partner will have your guns on the scientist doctor. He will be nonplussed, his smock covered in the blood of the person you recognize who is in the process of getting the surgery you want. Why should he have it and not you?

The doctor will smile at you and will know your name. He will know what you are there for, as if he’s been expecting you all along. He will know what you want.

“Of course you want your legs,” he will say, his voice slippery and seductive. He wears goggles on his face and a beard on his chin, but no mustache!!!!!!

He will tell you the only way for you to get what you want is to offer a blood sacrifice.

“Moloch does not do, but for blood,” he will say, stating it with pity in his voice as if he knows what it takes to do such a thing.

Your partner will look at you, their gun still trained on the doctor, they will look you in the eyes to see if you are believing this nonsense the doctor is spouting. To see if you are ready to retreat, back out of the door and leave this all behind, return to the running trail stumbling along the path slowly, but still whole, haltingly but without the kind of guilt that transforms you.

“We can’t back out now,” you’ll tell them. “What would your father say?” You ask, knowing just how to get to them. And your partner will swallow hard, sufficiently shamed, and they will step toward the celebrity whose sports trading card your kid has traded with your partner’s kid!!!!!! Your partner will put their illegally obtained weapon to the recognizable face of the famous person and pull the trigger, which will allow you the opportunity to place your gun to your partner’s head and dispatch them, shooting them through the skull before they even realize what you are thinking.

You understand what the evil doctor/mad scientist wants and that is your burden and your partner’s loss.

The doctor will not help you incinerate the bodies, but it will hardly register as a bother. You won’t feel anything as you stuff the bodies of the celebrity and your former partner into the furnace. You will smell the flesh burning. It will singe your nostril hair!!!!!

And as you go under from the anesthetics, the drugs like a black pool of water covering your face, you’ll think of how fast your mile time will be and how many more events you’ll be able to sign up for, how far you will go on your new legs.

5. Drink Lots of Water

Finally, make sure to stay hydrated. This may be the most important of all the tips. Its importance cannot be overstated. If a belt pouch isn’t enough you may have to bring a backpack bladder!!!! The body is comprised of 80% water, they say. Even though that is not true (especially not for you at this point because you will be comprised of a significant amount of steel and more electronics than that dishwasher you stopped pushing weeks ago, and the black goo that you thought was some kind of hallucination brought on by the anesthetics has actually replaced your blood as you discover when you cut yourself shaving and spray what looks like motor oil all over the bathroom mirror), it’s still important to drink lots of water to keep your joints lubricated and to maintain the correct level of hydration.

It will be lonely out there on the trail without your partner, but once you run far enough, fast enough, there will be new friends at the finish lines, fast friends who have also murdered their best friends and their lovers and their fathers and their children to attain their goals!!! Who knows what these new friends will push you to achieve, what they might be able to do for your career, what delights they will present you with.

You’ll finish in the top 10% for your age group at a benefit run for the local celebrity who used to do commercials for the local Toyota dealership, whose death is shrouded in mystery and whose killer is yet to be identified or apprehended. You’ll compare your new legs and laugh about the way you no longer feel anything when you are embraced by your child!!

You’ll all have a good laugh about it.

Happy running!

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Matt Meade lives just outside of Chicago, Illinois. His fiction has appeared in The Sun Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Bourbon Penn, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. He is currently seeking representation for his novel about the most American of all artforms: professional wrestling. You can hear his opinions on music every time he turns on the radio and you can read more of his work at matthewthomasmeade.com.