Today's lesson; the treadmill. It was pouring down rain... POURing. It was late and I was edgy and a little neurotic about my ankle (it's fine by the way) so I decided to go to the gym. There are definitely upsides to an indoor run. First of all, it's dry. Secondly, it's nice and cushiony under your feet. On the flipside though... It's boring as hell. Nothing like staring straight ahead at the wall or up at a TV with no sound for forty minutes to make you want to blow your brains out. Also, you have to decide how fast to go. I suppose this could be a good thing, you can work on keeping an even pace. But there's nothing natural about it. Outdoors you speed up and slow down all the time. Uphill, downhill, wind - you get none of it on a treadmill. Just left right left right left right blahblahblahbbblllaaahhhblblblbbl.
HATED it.
I just decided to use my stop watch to keep track of time and to mess around with the speed to see what happened. I definitely jacked the speed up too quickly and ended up running the last mile at 5mph for a few minutes to catch my breath. I was hot. Really hot. I had a horrible epiphany that the temperature of the gym was probably really close to the temperature it would be in Texas on the day of the race. Not motivating. I'm used to dark, wet 45 degree portland weather... This might be a problem. I quickly debate the pros and cons of conditioning myself in this new "race like" environment, decide that, as much as I pretend to be, I am NOT in fact an Olympic athelete, and that sweltering in the stinky, meathead infested gym for the next nine and a half weeks when I am gauranteed not to win this thing was a waste of my time. I leave both frustrated and red as a tomato.
And that, friends, is why treadmills are not for me.