Making friends with the 'mill

I headed out to the gym this evening for an easy 50 minute run on the old treadmill. As I may have mentioned before, I'm not a big fan of the treadmill at all. Once I got back into running over a year ago, I did a lot of treadmill work, and feel it was the cause of a lot of early knee pain.

Running on that thing feels so unnatural to me. I prefer to run on pavement every chance I get, and the conditions outside have to be EXTREME for me to stay in and run on the 'mill. Of course, then comes this thing called winter and I'm usually forced indoors for my shorter runs.

Lately, though, I've been feeling a bit more comfortable putting in some miles on the thing without driving myself nuts. My pace is usually pretty awkward on it, but ever since I figured out that raising the incline to 2.0, it feels a bit more natural. Although, it still feels like I'm going 50 mph on it when I'm only doing a 10 minute pace.

I had a little fun near the end and did 25 second intervals of raising the incline to 4.0 and back down without breaking pace. Perhaps some day I'll do some hill work using it, since I can't find any hills around here to save my life.

The good thing about getting back into the normalcy of working out is that I'm sleeping more soundly again. I had a hard time getting through a solid night of sleep when I was tapering for the Chicago marathon and I hated it. I'd wake up at all hours of the night. It's so much better now.

Tuesday I have a rest day, and Wednesday I'll be heading to the city to run with my CES group for a 60 minute run on the lakefront path. Saturday I'll do 8 miles, and then the mileage only goes up from there.

I'm ready for it!