[Max Krause]

I won’t speak to the drift test but I have some experience getting into running. When starting running the main worry isn’t lack of fitness but lack of leg strength leading to injury. So even if you are quite fit (or especially if you’re quite fit!) you’d want to start with run walking. I personally didn’t use this but some friends have had success using the couch to 5k program when getting into running or recovering from injury.

As for fitness my personal experience is that at the start it’s easy to improve. In retrospect I trained really poorly when I got into running from hiking a couple years ago (way over AeT all the time) but at that stage of fitness it’s so easy to improve that it didn’t matter. So my advice would be do the couch to 5k to build your legs and then redo the drift test as your AeT will probably have made a jump. And then you can decide whether to stick with run walking or go to consistent running.