My first official day of training has come to an end and it wasn't quite what I expected. I stuck to the plan that I explained yesterday (I did it 4 times, for a total of 4.4 miles in just under an hour at an incline of 1.0 except for the third time that was at 1.5 incline) but I found it much more challenging than the unstructured walk-jog I did on Saturday. On Saturday, I just put a towel over the front of the treadmill so I wasn't focused on time or distance and went between 5.3 and 4.0 whenever I felt like it. This time, I was so concerned with making sure I did the right distances (better not do too much or too little! Stick to the plan, woman!) that I even found 0.25 miles difficult. I've always been really bad at judging distances and the treadmill makes me even worse at it. At least outside I know that 20 streets is about 1 mile, but it gets dark very early right now and I don't feel comfortable running outside by myself once it's dark.
How do people stick to running plans like these without going crazy about watching the distance meter? I've only done it once and I'm already about to throw the plans out the window and just go by overall distance. But I think I'll give the plans another few training days and if I don't see any improvement then I'll reevaluate.
And since I'm already asking questions, I might as well throw out some other ones:
-When outside, how do you know your speed? Do you know that you should pass Store A after x minutes, etc?
-When on a treadmill, do you generally set it to hills or just do an incline or keep it flat? A friend told me that you should always set an incline on a treadmill because 0.0 actually helps push you forward a bit so even the lowest incline means that you have to pull yourself forward, like you would have to outside.
I planned for tomorrow to be a rest day since I'm back at work after being off since December 23rd and I expect to have a ton of emails and whatnot and have to stay late. However, I am going to bring my workout gear to work with me and if all goes well, I'll get out at a reasonable hour and I'll do some strength training.
Good luck at work tomorrow,
-J
1 comment:
First, love the idea of putting a towel over the treadmill numbers and just going with the flow. Watching the the distance creep up wayyy too slowly is maddening. Second, I'm no expert but have also heard that you need at least a 1.0 incline to mimic running outdoors. Proud of you!
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