Thursday, September 9, 2010

8 Miles of Hell

     Wow.  Blogging is a LOT tougher than running.  At least for me.  Sorry for the long delay between posts!

     Alright, SA RnR runners, just about 9 1/2 weeks to go!  How's your training going?!  This week I had an 8-mile hill workout for Tuesday and knew it was going to be an inside affair because of the rain and that fact that my 19-month old doesn't go to daycare.  So I tried to find a good hill workout for the treadmill and found a few from an old Running Times article.  I chose the pyramid workout, maybe because it had the word "fun" in the description.  Yeah, I'm gonna disagree with that.  

     Considering I've NEVER run at higher than a 6% incline on the treadmill, a person with more common sense (or less of a death wish), would have adjusted accordingly.  Not me.  Somehow I think I have an innate desire to learn things the hard way and to suffer as much as possible before the lesson is complete.  My warm-up mile was fine.  The first set was pretty tough and I think I looked away from the clock for about 5 seconds.  Again, I thought I'd be tough and shoot for the 2-minute recovery jogs.  When the second set came along, the life flashbacks began.  By the time I hit 7%, I was appreciating the fact that I have a living will.  

     So, yeah, that didn't last too long.  I stopped and took a break for about 5 minutes and realized that I'd barely covered two miles.  I made some major adjustments to the routine and cranked out the full 8 miles, feeling like much less of a tough runner but pleased that I finished.  

     I guess my advice, once again, is to take it easy when trying something new.  I know I can run eight miles.  But maybe not at 7% or 8% incline.  Maybe one day.  What kind of hill workouts do you do on the treadmill?  

Keep on runnin!

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