After much animosity, I have finally made peace with the Treadmill. For many years, I despised running on a treadmill, mostly because it made me feel like a bored and pitiable hamster—expending lots of time and energy, and all the while going absolutely nowhere.
Whereas last year I ran outside through the winter, this year the cold has gotten the better of me. I’ve been blaming this aversion to the cold on my growing instinct to secure my basic needs of warmth and shelter.
For lack of alternatives on a number of occasions, I found myself giving the treadmill another chance—and happily learned that it has actually improved my running pace quite significantly. The approach I’ve been using for my treadmill workouts goes something like this:
- Set the treadmill for a 30 minute run
- Spend the first 5 minutes at what I call my ‘resting pace’ (a slower pace I can maintain for long distances
- Add .5 mph to my speed incrementally at either 5 or 10 minute intervals
- Leave the last 5 minutes for cool down by resuming my resting pace
While there is nothing official about this approach, I am pleased to say that it has allowed me to gradually spend more and more of the 30 minutes at the faster paces. Within a month I’ve shaved almost 2 minutes to my average pace per mile. After doing a few Web searches on treadmill workouts, I found that it’s actually quite similar to a few suggested on the Runner's World Website.
So while I still can’t help but think about those furry little creatures as I hop on the treadmill, I have made peace with it. And I have something the hamsters don’t have—hundreds of potential training programs at my fingertips to fend off the boredom.
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2 comments:
Wow - 2 minutes is alot! Do you have a goal of being able to run a certain number of miles at a faster pace?
That's a great achievement. I havent made that much progress, but I thought I'd share two related comments:
1) Today I ran for the first time this year outside. I have been doing the treadmill 3x/week 4-5miles each time all winter. I was pleasantly surprised when I ran outside today that it was really easy - that has never happened before for the first run out of the spring. So I believe the treadmill can really help maintain or even boost your cardio capacity.
2) I like your workout idea. Here's what I did:
Workout #1: 10min easy pace, 5 strides (30 seconds each followed by 1min fast walk or slow jog), 10min easy, 5 strides, 10min easy.
Workout #2: 30min easy, 6 strides, 10min easy.
Both of these really helped me increase my speed. I would say I probably shaved a min off my pace, but more importantly, I feel good at the new pace, AND these workouts keep boredom at bay.
The last trick I'll share is that every one to two weeks I would increase my easy pace by .1 It's so miniscule that you don't notice it but after a month, your easy pace is suddenly 30-40sec faster.
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