treadmill

I'm at #VMworld this week, so I checked out the treadmill situation here at the Marriott last night.

I've never been on a treadmill before, and it was an adventure! After about 10 minutes of figuring out how to work the buttons to avoid re-creating this scene, I was off and running!

Did I say running? I meant walking. Slow walking.

There are 3 convenient buttons near the handles, that say "walk, jog, run." I pressed walk, and the treadmill started moving, but the pace was pretty slow. I pressed the jog button, which elevated me to my normal warm up walk speed. I stayed there for about 5 minutes and braced myself for the "run" button.

RUN!

Ok, so this seemed slightly slower than my normal running pace. It said I was going 6 MPH which should be about a 10 minute mile. I stayed there for 5 minutes or so, and my heart rate was elevated, and the sweat factory was in full production, I didnt seem to be getting winded. I manually turned it up to 7 MPH, and ran another couple minutes. I still wasnt getting winded, but my legs were starting to burn a bit.

Oops! I forgot about the elevation difference! I'm used to Colorado elevation, and here at sea level I cant use my normal "out of breath" measuring system.

Unfortunately the podrunner MP3 got interrupted, so I just tried to guess on the intervals, and finished up about 2.6 miles.

Some observations about treadmill running:
-Sweaty! I'm not sure if it was the lack of any breeze, or maybe the humidity level, but when I was done, it looked like someone had pushed me into the pool. I normally get a nice sweat on when running outside, but this was redonkulous.
-Boring! After 20 minutes I was looking up my own nose in the mirror and trying to count nose hairs.
-Risky! After the nose hair counting exercise, I just about killed myself when I missteped, and lost my balance a bit.
-Visible! If you're the kind of guy that like to flex in the mirror, this is probably appealing, but I felt like there should have been a placard in front of my treadmill that read "splash zone 10 feet"
-Chafing! With no room to "maneuver", I learned why boxer shorts+running do not go well together. Showertime was owiee time.

I'll try running again a couple more times and see if the lessons learned help out the experience.