12.11.08

Well I'll just sum up both of my runs today. They were both on the dreadmill due to the wind/rain/cold outside. The surprising part was that listening to my ipod instead of blaring my computer (to hear a movie over the treadmill) really seemed to make the run go by a lot faster. I also stopped halfway through both of these runs to refuel and mop up sweat, which is my biggest problem with treadmills. I had a fan on full blast blowing about two feet away, but in my small computer room there's really not a lot anything other than a full-fledged window air conditioner could cool down when I'm running.

So I maintained a much faster pace than I think I would have outside. It was interesting just to try a couple things. I also had the incline up a bit too, which I normally don't. I kept it around 7.5 for the first run, and even went on up to 7.7 then 8.0 for about 5-10 minutes, and then back to 7.5. This is a lot faster than I used to be able to maintain just remembering from last years runs on the mill. So I must be getting faster. My "later" run which actually wasn't too far along from the previous I decided to test even further to see where I was. I kept it on 8.0 the whole time, although I did back down to 7.8 for about two or three minutes for recovery. Toward the end I slowly increased from 8.0 to 8.6, increasing a notch every minute until the end of the run. I felt really good, although the legs were pretty tired. Not really a good recovery run...

So I decided to take a real ice bath tonight and it was cooold. But it felt good at the same time. It's amazing what a little ice can do for recovery. I was in for a good 15-20 minutes. The bad part was I put the ice in before I was in. So it was supercold and that first minute or two was just flat out freezing. After all that we went out to eat with our church group. It was really fun to see them and we had a great time. Hopefully tomorrow it won't be raining so I can do some outside running, but after today's runs I'm actually looking forward to the sweatmill. It was good to control my pace so easily and also not to have to run sideways like a nascar through 11 cul-de-sacs.

11:18am. tread
1:05:16, bf 786

4:56pm tread
1:04:30, bf 794