6 miles pretty easy
I am always having mental wrestling when I run on the treadmill!
(Especially since the other day I didn't put the top solidly on one of the bottles of water in my bag and it tipped over and killed my iPod!)
My latest thoughts:
For the most part I am fairly average as far as all this exercise stuff goes - but the one thing where I am really at the far pitiful end of the curve concerns heat. I come from a family of red-headed northern Europeans with a tendency to get faces the color of beetroot in hot weather! That is not to say one can't compensate by good training - one of the races where I'm still very proud of how I did was my first sub-2:00 half-marathon finish, on a truly disgustingly hot and humid October day that caused at least four people I knew to drop out of the race after four or five miles. But it is a battle, and I am not physiologically suited to it.
And treadmill running is hot.
So I'm pretty much mentally dealing with this by saying that I need to have a really clear division between relatively slow 'straight' runs, anything from an hour onwards, where I run at a pace that does not cause me to lethally overheat; versus shorter interval workouts where I run significantly faster than I usually do but just for stints. Otherwise I end up having these mentally gruelling runs where I am trying to keep up the same pace I'd have outside (10:00 miles for 6 miles would not be challenging in this summer's version of New York summer weather) and truly just feel awful and am still not running what I would call at all quickly!
Long way of saying that I am just going to have to suck up any notion of pride and admit that 5.5mph is better than 6.0 or 6.5 for anything longer than about 40 minutes indoors!
6 miles, 5.5mph (.5 incline), avg HR 143
2 comments:
Arrrgghh!!! Poor little iPod!
I am particularly unsuited to heat + humidity.
Even in the pool, water temperatures climb into the eighties and my times drop accordingly. Friday I had to check the clock twice -- my first two easy hundreds were closer to 1:50 than 1:45!!
Good for you -- getting it done!
Yes, treadmills generate a lot of heat by themselves and you don't get the same air flow (unless perhaps you have one of those giant fans blowing on you). I too find that I'm slower for the same amount of effort running on a mill.
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