You start at the beginning.

Or at least I do. No choice there, because while there's the same sporty person inside of me, further down theres a pair of lungs which are only just beginning to do their job again. It's like that R. Kelly song in reverse: "My minds telling me YES... but my body's telling me noo!"
At my worst, only 40% of the air that reached my alveoli (air sacs responsible for getting oxygen in and carbon dioxide out of the blood) actually got through to my blood, and since my airways were so inflammed and clogged, only about half the air I tried to breathe in, went in. So as you can imagine, breathing like a fish out of water got me no-where and even with oxygen I was pretty much laid up. Thanks to nuclear doses of steroids and antibiotics, I'm in a much better way now - about 60% lung function and gas exchange has probably doubled. So these days, I'm very breathless on exertion, like walking around or going up the stairs, but I breathe almost normally at rest. It's quite a lovely feeling to have, not gasping 24 hours a day, but with exercise still difficult, the temptation can often be to avoid it.
I know, I loved getting out of breath and doing lung-busting workouts before, so why not now? Hard to explain, but it's a different type of breathless... It comes on thick and fast, it burns, and it fills you with dread that you might not get your normal breathing back. Since my lung disease is a restrictive one as well as obstructive, I can't take very deep breaths yet and so am stuck with fairly shallow breathing for now.

Of course I'm harping on here about how difficult things are, but the aim isn't to make excuses for slow progress or set myself up for failure - it's to remind me how low you can go and how you can get back on track regardless. The goal in 'training' isn't to get fast quick or even get particularly fast at all, but to gradually get my old breathing back, and to gradually be able to run freely again. My body and mind are getting there and the way I see it, they may always just be a step or two ahead of my lungs.
Hence the name of this blog... If I have to put up with alot of pain in the beginning, it'll be worth it to coax my lungs out of their current state. The rest of me has to set a good example and my lungs will have to get on with it as best they can.

The plan is really to gradually add in teeny bits of running to my walks, which are getting more and more comfortable. Right now, I pick up in to a jog-shuffle for about 30 seconds on the last half of the walk... then take a couple of minutes to catch my breath, and carry on walking back. When this is more or less comfortable and I no longer have to stop altogether after the 'run'. I'll increase it to a minute. when that's comfortable, 90 seconds, and so on and so forth. Hopefully after some time things will pick up somewhat quicker, and the increments can be increased. This way, I can build up to 20 minutes of running without too much bother. No time frame as of yet, because I've yet to find out how long it'll take for me to feel comfortable with the 30 seconds.
We shall see.