Waving goodbye to another distance...

Today was my last three-mile run for quite a while. I won't have another one until May 9, Mother's Day, one week before the race.

I went on the treadmill, something else I won't be able to do much more of. The gym limits you to 30 minutes on the gerbil wheel when they're busy, which they often are. Too bad I didn't get to know the gerbil wheel better--it has all sorts of little programs on it, and I decided to spice things up by trying one today. I picked "Random," told the machine how much I weighed, dialed in a time (35 minutes), and then it requested an effort level. I randomly picked "7" without knowing what that meant, and the gerbil wheel started up. The top third of the display showed the elevation it would use for each increment (it put 20 increments in 35 minutes!), and the middle third had a bar graph with the speeds it would use for each one. All I could tell was that the top one looked to be over 7 MPH, which seemed way too fast, but I figured I could probably slow the speed manually if I needed to. The bottom third had a heart rate graph.

The workout really kept me on my toes! The display blinked with the new speed and elevation numbers it was switching to for 2-3 seconds, and then boom, it adjusted. Most of the increments were not hard for me to keep up with, but about 12 minutes in, there was an increment at 7.4 MPH (that's an 8:06 mile pace!!), and I punched it down to 7.1 and ran for dear life. I was grateful for the nice pokey 4.6 and 4.2 increments after that. The peak increment was around #12, and it was programmed for 8.1 mph! I didn't even let it switch on before I was mashing on the "lower speed" button. I got one more dose of high-speed adventure at increment 18, which was another 7.4 mph increment. This time I managed to run it without lowering the speed! It only lasted 60-90 seconds, but I felt very accomplished that I was able to get all the way through it.

The workout ended at 35 minutes and dropped me just short of 3 miles (2.96!), but I figure the 0.04 miles weren't that big a deal. I mean, hey, I ran an 8:06 pace without falling off the gerbil wheel, whoo-hoo!

Tomorrow: more adventures with Kim, the Real Live Pilates Instructor!