Another week on the treadmill

That’s another week of running in the bag. The weather has not really improved here, so it’s running in the gym or nothing for me at the moment. But it seems to be paying off. I’m working on technique and pushing my speed up.

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It used to be that running at 10km/h on the treadmill was the fastest I could go, and I could only hold that speed for a short time. Now it’s my warm-up pace. 11.5km/h is the new running pace for me with 12.5 being the challenge to hold.

I can do about 2-5kms at 12.5km/h at the moment, so the plan for next week is to push that distance higher if I can. I’m not going to go too hard though, because right now I’m at the start of my taper for the Wellington Marathon. But I do want to see if I can hold that pace for 10kms at least once this week.

But that is also dependant on the weather. If it sorts its act out and stops raining and being windy, then I’ll head back out onto the road in the morning.

I am finding the treadmill session useful though and I’m of the opinion that they need not be considered horrible and boring. I’m constantly checking my form and pace and tweaking what I’m doing.

For example, mid-week I was running quite hard – 12.5km/h (well that’s quite hard for me) and my right hamstring started to cramp. I was only about 5kms into a 15km run, so I didn’t really want to stop running and deal with it. From the research I’ve done about cramping when you are running, it is because the nerves are getting fried and get all confused about what they are supposed to do. So they fire like crazy, cramping the muscle.

So I tried a cunning plan. I changed the way I was running. I lifted my knees higher, and got a more circular motion going with my legs. That activated a slightly different portion of my muscles. I changed how and where the signals from my brain were sent to my hamstrings. The section that was cramping stopped being overwhelmed and calmed down. Within about 1 kilometre the feeling of cramp had gone and I was able to revert back to the way I was running before.

That’s really useful stuff to know for when you are I the middle of a race and things start cramping up. Just changing your gait can alleviate the cramp without having to stop.

Figuring that out alone makes all the treadmill sessions worthwhile to me.

But the week has not all been stuck inside on the treadmill. Oh no. there was a long run at the end of it. And that was definitely not inside on a treadmill. (I might have wished that it was though).

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