I took 1:47 off my 5K without changing a single thing about my training.

Part 1 — The PlateauEight months of training. The same time, every time.

If you'd looked at my training log last spring, you'd have said I was doing everything right. Four runs a week. A proper plan — easy runs easy, one interval session, one long run. Decent shoes. I even did the strength work most runners skip.

And my 5K time sat at 24:51. Then 24:56. Then 25:03 on a bad day, back to 24:49 on a good one. For eight months.

I did what every stuck runner does. Blamed the plan and bought a new one. Blamed my shoes and bought carbon plates. Blamed my easy pace, my cadence, my sleep schedule. Each fix bought me a good week, then the plateau came back like a tide.

The frustrating part wasn't the number. It was the feeling: every hard session, my legs had more to give but my breathing didn't. Gasping at a pace that shouldn't have been gasping pace. Heart rate ten beats higher than it had any right to be. Zone 2 that felt like Zone 3.

My watch kept telling me the same story, and I kept ignoring it: resting heart rate of 61 when runners my age and volume typically sit far lower. A VO2 max estimate that hadn't moved in a year. "Unproductive" training status, week after week, while I trained six hours a week.

It never once occurred to me that the problem wasn't in my running at all.

Part 2 — The CulpritThe problem was in my pocket, not my plan.

I'd been vaping since university. Not "a vaper", in my head — just someone who vaped. I ran 35km a week; surely that cancelled it out. I'd genuinely never connected the thing in my pocket to the numbers on my watch.

Then a physio friend watched me hit my vape in the car park before a parkrun and asked one question: "You know what nicotine does to blood vessels, right?"

I didn't. So I looked. And what I found explained eight months of my life.

Here's the part that stung most: none of my fixes had failed because they were wrong. The plan was fine. The shoes were fine. They just weren't touching the thing that was actually limiting me. You can't out-train constricted blood vessels four sessions a week when you're constricting them forty times a day.

Part 3 — The Obvious Answer"So just quit, then." I tried. Twice.

The maths seemed simple. Vape ruins running. Stop vaping, run faster. I quit on a Sunday night, full of resolve, a 10K plan printed and pinned to the fridge.

Part 4 — What Actually WorkedI didn't quit the ritual. I swapped what was in it.

A running friend — ex-vaper, annoyingly quick — put me onto what she'd used. Not a patch, not a gum, not another vape with the nicotine dialled down.

HISTICKS

The Histicks Journey Pack — one stick, replaceable flavour cores

A wooden stick with a flavoured core inside. You draw on it exactly like you'd draw on a vape — same hand-to-mouth motion, same pause, same small ritual — except there's nothing in it working against you:

• Zero nicotine. Nothing constricting your blood vessels, spiking your heart rate, or fragmenting your sleep. From the first swap, the stimulant load on your system starts falling.
• No smoke, no vapour, no electronics. Nothing to inhale into airways you're trying to let recover. It's flavoured air through wood — the draw and the taste, not the aerosol.
• Replaceable flavour cores. This is the clever bit. The stick is yours for good — when a core's flavour fades, you pop in a fresh one instead of binning the whole thing. One wooden stick, swappable essential-oil cores, in whichever flavours you actually like. No dead disposables rattling around the glovebox.
• Your flavours, delivered. Cores come in a monthly delivery, so the thing that replaced your vape never runs out at the exact moment your willpower does. My relapses both happened on a day I "just needed to buy something" — this quietly deletes that failure mode.
• The ritual survives. The pre-run pause, the post-run wind-down, the kettle moment — your hands keep their habit. You're not white-knuckling a hundred moments a day; you're handing them something else to hold.
• 100% natural. Wood and essential oils. Nothing that shows up on your watch the next morning.

The logic clicked instantly with how I'd failed before: my two quit attempts died in the ritual gaps, not the nicotine gaps. This filled the exact hole that broke me twice — and kept refilling it every month without me having to think about it.

Third quit attempt, with a Histick in the pocket where the vape used to live. The cravings still came — I won't pretend otherwise — but every time my hand went looking, it found something. The petrol-station moment never got its opening. Day nine passed. Then day nineteen. Then I stopped counting.

Part 5 — What Came BackThe gains showed up faster than I expected.

This is the bit I'd want to read if I were you: what actually happens to your running when the nicotine goes. Here's how it unfolded for me — the broad shape tracks what the physiology says to expect as circulation and airways recover.

One honest caveat, runner to runner: I can't promise you 1:47, and neither can anyone else — your plateau might have more than one cause, and your timeline is your own. What I can tell you is what nicotine does to oxygen delivery, sleep and heart rate is not in dispute — and you can watch your own watch tell you the story within the first fortnight.