In the post-apocalypse, if you want to peruse the moldy and looted isles of your local grocery store for the last, dented can of creamed corn, you may not be able to up and drive to the market. You might need to conserve gas, avoid the horrendous noise of the engine or keep off of the roads that will be clogged with abandoned cars that contain the dead clawing to get out. Walking will be a nice, easy stealth option, but if you get noticed, you’ll have to run, and depending on how far away your destination is, walking might be too slow to get you back to base camp on once piece or before dark. Jogging is the way of your future. It’s reasonably quiet, aside from your wheezing. And stepping over fallen trees, comrades and electrical wires isn’t as hard on foot as it is on wheel.

We’ll learn about cross-country running and other longer, ultra-marathoner strategies at a later date. For now, let’s just focus on getting to and from nearby locations. If you live in the middle of no-where, far from towns and cities, you maybe have less call to run and more freedom to drive, but your raiding missions will still involve jogging from where you ditch your vehicle to the buildings of interest. On your next trip into town or the megalopolis, spy where you first get stuck in traffic and use that as your future parking location to calculate your basic cardio goals.

I live in a bougie neighborhood, specifically chosen so that I can walk to everything that I enjoy on a daily basis. Even when I was nine months pregnant and waddling like a Hutt, I could still make it to the nearby hospital for my appointments. In the future, when I pillage their stocks, I will have to do less jogging than you will. Here are the distances from my house to locations of looting interest:

Grocery Store (Fred Meyer on Hawthorne) .8 miles

Library (Belmont Branch) .7 miles

Hospital (Providence Medical Center on Glisan) 1.3 miles

Fresh Water Supply (City of Portland Reservoir Number 6) .7 miles

Hardware Store (Division Do It Best) 1.3 miles

Garden Store (Portland Nursery on Stark) .5 miles

As you can see from these meagre distances, I’m starting with the basics. I just want some canned goods from the grocery store, so I only have to make it 1.6 miles roundtrip. We’ll get to running as far as major waterways, airports and distilleries later. We are also going to pretend that these first forays out into the world of the damned are just scouting missions – you don’t have to carry anything yet. Nor are we going to squabble about footwear. If you already run in steel-toe boots or those barely-there monkey foot jobbers, go ahead and continue to feel superior. For now, and in the early days of the post-apocalypse, I’m going to have access to my fluffy clouds with laces.

In the world of cardio, the word on the street is that stretching and warming up is important. We’ve already covered getting limber in Calisthenics, but warming up outside of the compound has debatable merits. You could just do some jumping jacks inside of your fortress, but you’re really supposed to do something a bit more involved to avoid injury. Perhaps, as we tiptoe out of our secure abode, our very first quick walk around the block to see what we can see will be our warm-up. If the gut-munchers aren’t thick enough to scrap the mission entirely, the first pokes around the hood can raise our temperatures slightly. If we have to jog right off the bat, the first few min of our mellow pace will sufficiently act as a warm-up and lead us to believe that warm-ups were bullshit in the first place.

It is going to be necessary that our jogging pace be mellow. Not only is a mellow pace going to allow you to warm up and spit the nicotine out of your system, but it is quieter than slamming your feet around on the pavement. A slow and steady pace will help assure that you don’t spend all of your energy in the first half of a block and burn-out or cramp yourself to a certain death in the middle of a horde. The more moderately you go, the less likely you are to panic and miss the warning signs of an obvious death trap. To maintain proper vigilance and stamina, breathe steadily and confidently as you jog. Survey your surroundings. Notice the gait of those around you, take note of possible high ground, admire the preparedness of others, or look down on their innocent naivete with scorn and derision.

If you are less than in shape, and you have a hard time remaining in motion, it may help you to picture a deranged mob loping behind you. There is no need to stress yourself out or anything, but there’s a real chance that if you stop, you’ll die. And you’ll die just as slowly as you were moving, while the monsters pull your intestines into their gaping maws inch by inch. So get moving. We’re starting with the location of interest that is closest to your house. You need that last, dented can of creamed corn. You can make it this short distance. You must.

After you have been to your location of interest, and seen just how bad the situation is, and just how under-prepared you are in terms of amo, you are going to have to sprint the last three blocks or so on the way home, circling and winding around and out of sight, to lose your pursuers. You don’t want them to follow you back to your lair. You want to ditch them in your dust and duck unseen back into your cozy survival nest.

This is a daunting task. That’s why we’re preparing now, instead of waiting for the mushroom clouds to start blooming. If you don’t suck it up and get your lungs working now, you’re going to end up like that guy down the street who uses that cheap, plastic faux picket fence around his daisies – with the soulless pouring in through his garden window and eating his wife wrapped in her bluebird apron burrito.

As I strive to reach my basic cardio goals, I will snap pictures of some of my neighbors’ accidental preparedness triumphs and follies. This will also lead to our first attempts at proselytizing. Attempts at conversion should not be wasted on Jesus. Preach of zombie wiseness to the masses. We will also explore the technical aspects of lactic acid and slow-twitch muscles.

NOTE: All of this talk of jogging assumes that the undead will be slow stumblers. If the zombies turn out to be really fast, coked-out dashers like in 28 Days Later or the Reavers from Serenity, we’re all dead if we’re caught outside. The strategy then won’t be to out-jog them, it will be to remain unseen and indoors through several waves of infection, while they bash each other’s heads in, which they will do until they dehydrate, not starve.