KINDNESS OF "STRANGERS"

I want to try to post my daily workouts, along with some background info. So before I get to the "History of Zeke - Part 2, here's my workout from yesterday.

I’m lucky enough to work for a company that has a “fitness center” in its basement. It has some free weights, weight machines, 4 treadmills and a pair of stair masters, ellipticals, and bikes. When I run in the morning, I do most of my workouts outside. However, if we get a lot of snow or ice or if it’s “too cold” I’ll hit the treadmill. For me, “too cold” has been about -10 degrees this winter. Now that it’s March, it’s not likely it’ll get that cold again and it wasn’t that cold yesterday - it was actually about 5 or 10 degrees. However, after tasting 40-50 degrees a little last month and running outside most of the winter, I wasn’t in the mood to run in the cold. Besides, I had a harder workout planned and I wanted to get a better sense of pace, so I headed inside.

I was surprised to find someone in the fitness center before me, since I got there at 5:45. I was also surprised to see that we were down to 3 treadmills. The gal walking was on the nice treadmill. It’s wider and softer than the other 2, but more importantly, it has a place for water bottles. Not a huge deal, I hop on one of the other treadmills and figure she’ll be done walking by the time I’m done with my warm-up. 3 minutes into my warm-up, she tells me to switch treadmills with her. I tell her it’s not a big deal, but she insists. I just thought that was really nice of her.

As for my run, Thursdays are one of my harder days. It consisted of a 1.5 mile warm-up, 9 miles of up-tempo, progressive, pace work – or whatever you want to call it - and a 1.5 mile cool-down. I haven’t done a lot of these workouts lately, so during the 9 miles, I erred on the side of “too slow.” I started out at 7:15 and decided to pick up the pace every 3 miles, dropping to 7:00, then 6:45 for the final 3 miles.

While I hope my next marathon is faster than all those paces, I’m always amazed at how hard this kind of workout feels on a treadmill. I don’t know if it has to do with the sound of the motor, running in place or what, but it sure felt harder than 9 miles at 7:00 pace. Maybe it’s because my easy days are so slow that 7:00 pace just feels that much harder. If that’s the case, I hope my body and mind adjust after getting a few of these workouts under my belt.