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Saturday, March 16, 2013

Treadmill run.

I didn't take any pictures because I'm lame. Feel free to hate me.

I've been doing a lot of treadmill running recently. For a while it's because I was traveling and treadmill running is easiest when you're on the road. (Not the touristy type of traveling though, because then I would highly recommend running outside) And for a while when I wasn't traveling, I was just being lazy. (I live in an area that isn't super safe for runners, so I usually drive somewhere else to run)

Anyway, I think with the amount of treadmill action I was seeing (Oh baby), my mind was numbed to how awful it can be. Don't get me wrong - there are some great perks to the t-mill. Once you drown out the screaming in your head. However, after getting in a couple runs outside and then going back to the treadmill, all I can say is eugh eugh eugh eugh.

Let's start with the positive: I love (to a certain extent) being able to control the pace. It allows me to do something that sort of resembles speedwork. I don't know anything about pacing (I haven't run very many races, so I don't know what 5k, 10k, etc paces are for me) and I don't think I've run enough to judge effort (Is this 70% max effort? Or only 68%?), so my version of speedwork is just to run for a certain distance at a pace faster than I would normally choose. Seems simple enough to me. And I love that the treadmill has everything laid out in front of me.

Paradoxically, the thing I hate about running on the t-mizzle is that...everything is laid out in front of me.

I still have HOW MANY MILES LEFT????

And am I the only one that feels this way, or does it seem like it takes a lot more effort to run at the same pace (or in my case, a slower pace) on the hamster wheel than it does outside?

It just gets depressing. I hate looking at the display and feeling like I'm stuck in the land of slugs. (One of my classmates in college - seriously, guys, college - once called me a slug. And slugs aren't exactly quick. So I thought they were appropriate for this description. And yes, he called me this after he already knew I ran/hobbled/crawled/log-rolled a marathon. I don't get it.)

Since I'm not usually much faster than slugs anyway, I won't talk hard numbers. But let's just say that my warmup mile outside with a hill was at a pace that would be hard to maintain on the dreadmill. My overall pace for my run outside (which I'm choosing to consider a tempo :P) was about 1:30 min/mile faster than I usually do inside.

Is this all in my head? Or is there something about treadmills that messes with pace? I've heard that they're technically supposed to be easier than running outside, so I set the incline at 1.0% to help negate that. Is it because I'm expecting it to be hard that makes it difficult? Or is it because I can watch every 0.001 mile tick away?

Anyone else out there experiencing the same thing? Bueller? Bueller?

(By the way, today I'm thankful for my library card. My broke a** college grad butt can't afford my book addiction. Hollaaaaaa free books!!)

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