Week 3 - In which I contemplate my love/hate relationship with the treadmill...

Seeing as it is the wintertime, and of course I neither have nor particularly plan on investing in cold-weather running gear, by necessity all of my running is at one of the two gyms on campus. Furthermore, the indoor tracks are both short (one just less than 200 meters, the other closer to a bizarre 300 meters) and have a fixed schedule of clockwise or counterclockwise running - which would mean, for instance, that if I were to run only on the track, every long run on Sunday -or every interval workout on Tuesday, or what have you - would be in the same direction. Much as I relish the prospect of having one leg substantially larger than the other, this mean that I end up running mostly on the treadmill.

I used to loathe the treadmill. Or, rather, I assumed that I did, never having to use one much. And now that I've had a few weeks of heavy treadmill usage, I'm still not the biggest fan, for all of the usual reasons: the monotony, the lack of scenery or even the sensation of moving through space (it's not like there's that much scenery on the indoor track, after all, but at least you feel like you're moving), the lack of a breeze (what I wouldn't give for a fan in front of me on those longer runs!), etc. Plus, I'm left wondering just how comparable running on the treadmill really is to running on the ground... are the pace settings really equivalent efforts to running that fast over pavement?

However, I'm slowly coming to appreciate the 'mill, at least a little bit. A few weeks before I started a friend of mine remarked that treadmills take a lot of the mental effort out of running/exercising. At the time I didn't really understand that remark much at all, but now I see how true it is: you just set the pace and incline to whatever you like, and then just run. You don't have to focus on maintaining a pace (which is good - it turns out maintaining a steady pace is something I'm terrible at), you don't have to worry if you're slowing down a bit. You just tell your legs to keep running, and you can then just space out - or listen to the music, or what you will - until the little clock tells you that you've run the desired distance.

Also, I really like the name. I realize that treadmills and treadwheels were once actually used for milling purposes, but I just like the idea that the treadmill is there, slowly grinding me down and leaving behind only...well, I'm not quite sure... the quintessence of distance running or something like that, I suppose.

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Monday: A scheduled "easy week" (with the quotations only because to me it still seems absurd to label a week with 24 miles in it "easy"). So, 20 minutes on the stationary bike, and 8 minutes of Eight-Minute Abs (which, it turns out, are way less fun when done outside of Mission or Prospect).

Tuesday: 5 x 1000 meters at MP - 0:30

Wednesday: 5 miles at MP - 0:15

Thursday: 3 miles at MP + 0:15, followed by 2 miles at MP - 0:15

On Friday, The Coach said "rest."
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Anyway, other than running and steadily putting in the time at the office, this was a pretty uneventful week. The semester starts this coming Tuesday, so I'm sure things will start picking up soon. But for now, nothing much to report... sorry!

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Saturday: 5 miles at MP - 0:15

Sunday: 6 miles at MP + 0:15
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Recent goal accomplished: This week, with "The Man Who Wasn't There" and "Blood Simple," I finished my quest to see every Coen brothers film over the break.

Current estimate of my odds of running a marathon on May 1st: 65%