Thursday, March 20, 2008

This just in: Treadmills are boring!

Honestly, I feel really bad for the folks up in the frozen north that have to spend most of the winter running on silly little machines while not actually going anywhere.

Here's the setup: As you know from my previous posts, I'm just coming off a severe lack of running and need to get back into shape. I was supposed to run on Monday, but an influx of green beer kept that from happening. So I needed to get out and run again yesterday at some point. However, North Florida was supposedly expecting some tremendous rain, along with winds rivaling those of the Gate River Run (see previous posts for the recap of that experience).

Given that sort of weather, I decided that it would be a whole lot easier to just go to the gym and run indoors. I jumped on the treadmill (for the first time in even more than five months) and set it to warm up. I selected a simple 5k loop program, and set the incline at 2%. All well and good. After a few minutes of warm-up, I kicked the speed up to a nice, relaxed 6mph (10:00 mile) and settled in for a 2/1 run/walk ratio.

And it killed me. I don't know what it is, but that dang treadmill just really hurts! When I have no problem cruising along outside at anywhere between 8:30 and 9:30 during a 1/1 training run this past weekend, I was struggling like hell to keep up with a 10:00 mile on a stupid little rolling rubber mat. Of course, it doesn't help any that there's no scenery, and no downhill stretches, but dang, that's just depressing!

Luckily, we're in the part of the year where the running is best around here -- daylight saving time has kicked in, but the weather isn't too hot. Hopefully, I'll get a lot of good *outside* runs in while this keeps up.

But I still hate the treadmill.

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