Treadmill running

in #running6 years ago

I know what you’re thinking, “How awful, running on a treadmill”. While it’s not the most fun you can have running, I’m finding that it suits a really useful purpose.


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We’ve had a really sharp cold snap here in New Zealand with freezing temperatures, cold winds and just miserable weather. This has been the pattern for the last two weeks.

Being the complete wimp that I am, I’m not getting up at 5.45am to run in the rain and hail and 50km/h southerly winds. I’m just not that hard. So the alternative was to go to my local gym and run on a treadmill to get the miles in. My legs and lungs don’t know the difference between running on the road and running on a treadmill. The training effect is still the same.

So I rolled out of bed, made my wife a coffee, and headed out the door every weekday morning for the last two weeks (except last Friday).

At the gym I tested the calibration of my favourite treadmill to see how closely it matched my Garmin watch. I was a bit surprised to see they were pretty much in sync, both in distance and my heart rate. So when it ways I have run 10km, I have probably run 10km, at least to the same accuracy as the watch I have been using to measure such things. So I’m all good with that.

The first week I just did my standard 10km run before breakfast, not pushing hard, just trying to get it done in around 1 hour or so. That was all no drama, so last week I bumped the distance p to 15km.

That’s where things got a little interesting. I discovered that the treadmills only operate for one hour and then they turn off. So I quickly figured out that I had to run 10kms in under an hour, turn the machine off, turn it back on again and run the next 5 kms.

Since I’m recording the time on my watch and the distance on the treadmill, that was not too much of a problem once I got it figured out.

But id did mean I had to pick up the pace for a bit in order to get the first 10km run done before the one hour was up. So I kicked the speed counter into a much higher gear – 12.5km/h (which is pretty fast for me and my little legs). Surprisingly I found I could handle this for a full kilometre. I’ve never been able to hold this pace for more than a couple of hundred metres before.

This higher speed requires a different running action. So not just running faster, but a change in the way my legs and body move. I could feel the tendons and muscles in my legs working in a different way (which has made them just a bit sore!). This was really interesting.

And that’s where the treadmill comes into its own I think. You can set a specific pace and hold it for a specific time or distance. You can’t cheat and slow down a bit. It also then allows to you play with your running style at that pace to see how slight variations affect your running performance.

It’s a great place for experimenting because you can focus on your running form without having to worry about the terrain, or cars or dogs or fecking pedestrians that take up the whole footpath and decide to walk right into your path, just as you are passing them so you have to dodge, at speed, and end up in the gutter. That does way more damage to your legs than the repetitive strain of running on a treadmill.

So last week I clocked up 60km on the treadmill, mostly running at a 6min/km pace and then kicking in to a 4:50min/km pace for a couple of kilometres. Apart from quite tight ankles at a result of the fast sections, my legs and lungs came through that fine.

The weather looks like it will be a bit warmer for the next week or so, but still quite rainy and miserable. So it will be a pot-luck each morning I think. If it is fine, I’ll run on the street, otherwise it will be back to the gym. I’m keen to find out how long I can hold the 4:50min/km pace for, and see if I can push myself up a level in terms of fitness.

There are three weeks left until my next race – the Wellington Marathon, so if I can level up before then, that would be very helpful.

I have one week of training left, then a hard long run next weekend, and then it is taper time. I’m looking forward to that!


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