Treadmill vs. the ground

It turns out that running on a treadmill and running on the ground are really rather different.

[T]hese biomechanical considerations explain why it is almost always better for serious athletes to train in real conditions rather than on the treadmill when given the choice. Working out on a treadmill in a controlled environment is better than slipping along on icy roads, plodding through snow drifts, fighting gale-force winds or battling with high heat and humidity, but it is unlikely that treadmill training can improve running economy as effectively as overground work. In fact, the movement patterns of the two types of activity are so different that treadmill training might even retard improvements in overground running economy - a particularly troubling thought.

It's also just more fun to run outside. Right now, though, the "icy roads and snow drifts" argument is more than enough to keep me inside.

Drop

Two-pound drop. If you weigh yourself every day like I do, you learn to treat those impostors -- two-pound gains & two-pound losses -- just the same.

I am at my lowest spot weight since November, and my lowest 7-day average since December. My spot weight bottomed out at 175.2 and my seven-day average at 176.1, both in October, about three months after I stopped the Shangri-La routine.

I've now run 32 days in a row. My year-to-date mileage (243 km) has surpassed last year's January through March mileage.

Life Fitness T3-5

I promised a review of our new treadmill, and I'm now officially breaking that promise. I wrote a review, then read it, and realized that I don't have much insight or authority.

I will say that I like it very much, and it's a wonderful Survival of the Thinnest tool. With just a few button presses, I tell it to get my heart rate to 160 and keep it there for 30 minutes, and it does the rest. Well, I have to run and run and run, and for a few minutes I have to run up a rather steeper incline that I would like.

I run daily at 11.5 km/hour, which is almost exactly my half-marathon pace from last September. It gives me 2 or 3 minutes to warm up, then starts to crank up the incline until my heart is pumping at my goal rate. The incline usually gets to around 5% or 6%, but I've seen it go above 8%. Then the incline goes gradually down (and occasionally back up a little) for the rest of the run. Some days it gets all the way back to 0% incline, and once even that wasn't enough to keep my heart rate low enough, so it slowed my pace a notch. I bumped it back up manually, and my heart rate stayed near enough to 160 that it didn't try to slow me down again.

I have a couple of minor complaints about the treadmill. It doesn't show pace in minutes per km (or mile), other than briefly while one is manually raising or lowering the pace. Other than that, it just shows km or miles per hour. I'd say that most runners think in terms of minutes per mile, not miles per hour. Another thing is you have to take what it shows you on the display. If you want to know how many minutes you've run, and it instead happens to be showing how many minutes you've been in your target heart rate zone, well, you just have to wait. Eventually it will switch back to showing total minutes. The Precors I'm used to let you change the display at any time.

But those are minor quibbles. I'm quite pleased with it.

Currently my running streak stands at 25 consecutive days, with the last 21 on the Life Fitness. 25 may be more than I've ever done in my life. Certainly it is in the last five years.

I've noticed that my appetite at meal time is lower lately, but between meals I often crave snacks. This is the opposite of when I was on Shangri-La, when I rarely snacked but when meal time came, I was often pretty hungry. Maybe it was just the forced twice-daily two-hour flavorless windows that cut down my snacks; or maybe the oil was the snack.

In any case, the 25 days of running hasn't had a dramatic effect on my weight. My seven-day average has dropped only 1.6 lbs. since my running streak began.

Treadmill adventure

A little experiment with our new treadmill gave me a bit of a surprise. I'd been using it with English units (miles & pounds). I'm used to using metric, but I just hadn't bothered to change it yet.

I'd set up what LifeFitness calls a "workout profile," which saves a workout for quick selection later. In this case, it goes for 30 minutes at 7.1 miles per hour, and it automatically adjusts the incline to keep my heart rate near 160 beats per minute. I like how the profiles work; with four button presses I'm up and running.

I thought there was a slight chance that it stores the unit setting as a part of the workout profile, so I could easily run my metric workout, and not have to set the global units to metric. My wife prefers English units.

So I set the treadmill to metric and reprogrammed my workout profile to go at 11.5 km per hour (fractionally faster than 7.1 mph). I also changed my weight from 180 lbs to 82 kg. It uses this to calculate kcal used. I don't really pay attention to that, but I thought that I may as well have it right. Then I set the treadmill back to English units, and started up my workout.

It accelerated to 11.5 miles per hour! Yikes!

I don't know about you, but I can't sustain that speed for anything close to 30 minutes. Or 3 minutes.

It also put my weight at a hyper-anorexic 82 lbs.

So much for that experiment. For now, I'm going to leave the profile at 11.5 some-units-per-hour, and just change the units setting before and after each run. It takes about 8 or 10 button presses, which is a mild annoyance. I just know that periodically I'm going to either forget to change it before, and go on a brief, wild run until I frantically hit the stop button, or forget afterwards and confuse and annoy my wife.

More on Unhappy Meals

Seth Roberts doesn't share my opinion of the Michael Pollan piece.

New month, new low

Well, a recent low, anyway. Both my spot weight (178.8 lbs.) and my seven-day average (180.1) are lower than they've been since December.

I'll post a review of the Life Fitness T3-5 treadmill in the next week or so. It helped me achieve my highest January mileage (117 km) since I've been keeping track. My current streak is 11 straight days. There are runners that go for years without missing a day. I don't hope to match that, but I do intend to miss as few days as possible. My best stretch last year was 40 out of 41 days -- two 20-day streaks, with one travel day in the middle. Had I had a treadmill then, I'd have run that one day too.