Treadhills

That's what you get for trying something new I suppose. During my self-imposed "recovery" week I decided that simply running easy on a treadmill was too boring. Intervals were out of the question, so how could I make things more interesting?

Hills!!!

Well, virtual hills. I set the treadmill on the "Random Hills" setting at Level 12 and began to trot at 6.2mph for a nice 5 minute warm up. The machine cycled through some incline settings that topped out at 5% and I realized that the lowest setting was going to be 3% if I stayed at this Level. Since I was trying to take things easier I took the drastic step and dropped the difficulty Level down a whopping one setting to Level 10! Now the lowest the thing would get would be 2%.

OK, I can handle that (I thought to myself) and after the first five minutes I set the speed at 7.5mph (4:58/km, 8:00/mile in flat ground outdoor type conditions). That is when the fun started...

I quickly realized that I had set myself up for exactly the type of workout that I didn't want: intervals! Hill intervals no less!!! Did I quickly change the settings and choose to run a nice even training jog? Hells no!!!

The treadmill did this:

• 1 minute @ 2%
• 1 minute @ 5%
• 1 minute @ 2%
• 1 minute @ 6%
• 1 minute @ 2%
• 1 minute @ 7%
• 1 minute @ 2%
• 1 minute @ 8.5%

I cycled through this almost three complete times, but on the third repeat I hit the 30 minute mark, which happened to occur right after I finished the 7% incline setting interval, and changed the difficulty to Level 3 (0% low setting, 2.9% high setting). After all, I was supposed to be taking things easy and these were starting to get challenging!

Anyway, it was definitely not boring so I suppose it's a "win" on that front. Ultimately I ran 5 miles (roughly 8km) in 40:52 (5:05/km, 8:11/mile average pace). It was a good workout and I will definitely do this, or something like this, again. But as far as recovery week goes this was NOT part of the plan.

Perhaps I should have braved the -13C and really windy conditions that made it feel like -25C and taken an easy run before work?

Didn't think so.

But on a happy note this run pushed my monthly mileage up over the 100km mark, which means I've been into triple digits every month in 2010! Nice. Perhaps next year the goal will be to do the same in miles...