Thursday, July 28, 2005

Maintenance run

Today I ran a 3 mile maintenance run on the treadmill. The treadmill has a bunch of different programs you can run. You can in a straight line if you like. Or they have a track program so you can relive your high school glory days on the track. They have a cross country program and some cardio programs as well. Really there are two different routines. Flat & not flat. The flat routine is exactly what you would expect. Boring. When I would run laps I would generally set the incline to 2.0. This more accurately reflects the difficulty level of a road. No road is totally flat.
The "not flat" routines all seem the same, they change the steepness of the rake at set intervals. For the cross country programs the intervals are irregular, with a couple of spikes thrown in for good measure. The cardio & interval programs are pretty regular patterns of flat,slight hill, steeper hill, less steep hill, flat. You then repeat for 30 minutes. Part of me wonders if I wouldn't be better off just running up a steep incline for 10-15 minutes and be done with it. Especially because hills are my weakness. What the treadmill should really do is slow down a little bit when the angle increases. I mean c'mon. You have to run the same pace up hill as down? Or on a flat? True I can always change the speed myself. But maybe I am too lazy for that.

Saturday I run 12 miles. I am still low on my fundraising. Anything help.
thanks
big hugs and love
Doug

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