Depends how much weight you've gained and how good you are at getting back to fighting weight. Sorry for the obnoxious answer, but thats the hard part for a lot of people. Aerobic fitness? It depends where you were at. Generally it takes people a matter of weeks to get back to the point where they can 'base' train and a few months to get close to old fitness. If, however, you're dragging around an extra 20 lbs, you'll go no where near as fast as you used to.

depends. i just started back up again as well. took a solid 2.5 years off. a few rides/runs here and there, but i could never string anything together.

last week i was able to put in almost 9 hours, this week almost 12. hit 33 miles running (this week) for the first time in almost 3 years..

luckily for me, i'm pretty light. 14X, now down to 135ish. race weight is generally 124-126. which helps a ton. the legs feel like bricks today. if you didn't gain more than 5% body weight, you're probably looking at 3-4 weeks. my hr for 9min pace has dropped 15 bpm in the past 2 weeks already.

Awesome. Thanks for the responses. I’ve gained around 17lbs.... not ideal but it is what it is. For right now I just want to get back in the groove of daily training (or really just exercising.) I feel as if I can stick with it a few weeks I’ll get a bit more into it. I don’t have any training partners anymore since we move to the country but I don’t too much mind the lonely miles. Getting to the pool will be interesting as I used to swim at 4:30am 4 days/week. Now it’ll be 40min drive to the pool. Guess I had better check out what all the fuss is about Zwift. Anyways the outside riding will be nice as I have a 6’ shoulder for about 50 miles in 1 direction so that’s cool. Guess we will see if I stick with it. Time to drag the bikes out and get em wipes down and aired up.

Depends on how old you are and what you did while you were away. I took about 1.5yrs away from serious training to focus on other types of fitness, but was still very active in that timeframe...lifting weights 6x/week, some crossfit stuff, and still typically got in 20mpw minimum of running, sometimes 30, maybe the odd week at 35-40 if I was strapped for equipment access. Running came back quick when I increased volume and frequency again, biking took some time (did none of it during the break), and I don't swim anymore so can't report there. I'm also only 22.

I had some injuries that impacted/continue to impact my comeback that may make my process different than yours. Bum rotator cuff (part of the cause of the layoff, and a pretty bad lower back injury continue to complicate things for me.

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"Don't you have to go be stupid somewhere else?"..."Not until 4!"

I had ~18 months of pretty sedentary life a few years ago, and it took ~3-4 months to get back to a place where I felt like I was pretty fit (albeit not close to when I previously left off).

When starting up again, I couldn't even run because my HR would just spike w/in five minutes and I'm too impatient/stupidly prideful to do walk/run mixing. I took about a month to get to 30'-45' of riding 5x a week at low effort; it was miserable, but I went from having heart rate just spike at 10-15mins in no matter the effort level to keeping HR appropriately low and stable. It also let me readapt to pedaling effectively before going for intensity. I gradually reintroduced intervals and built volume, and found that after another 6-8 weeks I was able to do the types of workouts I was used to without it taking a multi-day toll (albeit at a much lower volume and intensity). Another 6 week block and I was able to do the same volume timewise and it was just a matter of putting in the consistent efforts.

It takes a lot to get to the peak of where you were at, but I was surprised at how quickly I was able to get to a point where I felt like I was really training again (for me, bare minimum = 6 hours a week with a structured mix of intensity and Z2 work).

I recently had about 9 months off, well i lost interest, but did a couple of workouts per week out of habit...

In the last 7 weeks I've got back into a good rhythm (no work travel is a real benefit for me!) and built back up to 12 hours per week, just cycling and running.

i feel fit again, although I'm aware I've got a long way to go, I managed 5k at 3hr marathon pace last week, it realistically felt more like 5k PB effort (PB is 17:50), and my FTP has gone from 250w (peak was around 320w) and a long session based on 275w was a bit too easy really tonight, I'd like to do a test but know that kind of effort is likely to set me back a few days so a bit nervous to do it right now, particularity if it turned out to be disappointing!

I've lost 3kg but still have around another 4kg to get to my normal weight, and my resting heart rate has dropped about 5bpm...

So 7 weeks is enough for a pretty decent progression, i think my biggest limiter at the moment is weight, so that's getting a bit more of a focus but the lack of work travel means significantly reduced junk food and right now my only vices are beers one night a week and a new pizza oven I've just bought, but everything in moderation right...?

It took me about two months to get back to enough fitness to do sprint tris, and five to get to HIM shape (complete, not compete). Here at seven months I'm in decent shape to actually compete (if there were any races).

For my path back, the first step was just to get the mileage base back up and to shed weight. I trained by HR, since my "natural" pace was too hard to go very long at my existing fitness level.

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ECMGN Therapy Silicon Valley:
Depression, Neurocognitive problems, Dementias (Testing and Evaluation), Trauma and PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

Awesome hopefully in about 8 weeks I’ll see something that resembles fitness. Always the base mileage is the hardest for me. I’ll start watching a bit more what I shove down my pie hole also. I don’t expect to be running 17min 5ks; but hopefully by then I can start doing some form of speed work. Hopefully some muscle memory will kick in🤷🏼‍♂️. Oh and I’m 36yrs old. 6’2” 189lbs currently.

For me it was kind of an "S" curve. I needed to build fitness to do longer workouts to lose more weight. Once that kicked in my performances improved fairly quickly since fitness/weight loss both enabled the other (improving both sides of W/kg).

I would have thought my decades of "base" would have allowed me to jump back in fairly quickly...no dice. At the beginning I was struggling to do 2mi. runs at what used to be cooldown pace. I'm now doing 10mi. easy runs faster than that :).

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ECMGN Therapy Silicon Valley:
Depression, Neurocognitive problems, Dementias (Testing and Evaluation), Trauma and PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)