Treadmill trouble

I had my first experience with a real amount of snow this weekend (6.1 inches, not as much as Philadelphia but still quite a bit more then I am use to seeing as a Tennessee native). I could have run outside on Saturday, I am for sure but I did not want to chance. The news had me scared that I would slip, fall and then die a painful long horrible freezing death in a ditch. All that would identify me would be my road id (no, I don’t get paid to promote this).

So I decided to check out my apartments fitness center. I wrapped up in far too many layers of clothes, put on my fake UGG boots and sloshed to center. The center is this tiny room with two treadmills, a stationary bike, a couple of weight machines and elliptical. I felt like the whole time the woman on the elliptical was drafting off of me like in an 800 meters race it was so close. There were about 4 people in the small space and all seemed intently focused on the television that was turned to Animal planet.

I started the treadmill and as usual it starts off at a ridiculously slow pace (crawling for water in the Sahara pace). I bumped up to about 8:00 pace with the intention of bumping the pace up every 5-10 minutes depending on how I felt. 8:00 just felt slow. So I changed again thinking 7:30 would do. I stayed on that for about 5 more minutes before bumping again. Then that felt miserably slow. So I decided not to focus on the pace but rather just what the speed felt natural.

Needless to say, when I finished my run and reviewed the facts, I had run 6 miles at the average speed of 6:10 pace with the last mile at 5:00. If this is the truth, I need to enter some races and maybe find myself an elite coach. I know this has to be far from the truth, I venture to say I most likely closer to 7:00 min pace and maybe 5.5 miles.

I do not know whether to be upset about knowing the right numbers or happy that I actually made it through a treadmill run without worrying about pace.