Valentines Day

Happy Valentine's Day, Sweetheart! It all started at the Delaware Distance Classic and it's been a great run since. Here's to many more miles!

Running, on the other hand, is a bitch of a mistress. She demands you give her everything and the next day there she is just wanting it again. No Valentines props for her. With that in mind, today's workout was most appropriate.

The original plan was to run tempo outside. GP emailed me this morning saying that, given my reluctance to modify my schedule last week, he'd wait to hear from me how the workout went. He swears he wrote this without any irony, perhaps I am too jaded to believe that. Anyway, I wrote back and told him that no way was I going to get a tempo run in today, given all the snow and freezing rain that we got last night. I ask him for alternatives on the hamster wheel, given the limitation of it maxing out at a 6-minute mile pace. He emails back to warm up a mile and then go five hard.

This was more of a consolation workout, as it would give me a sweat but would not come near to breaking me. But I dutifully went to USP's ARC to get the workout in. As I was doing my warmup mile I remembered in winters past how I'd compensate for the speed cap by messing with the incline and then my mind started getting sadistic. I usually have the incline on '1' as the default, as I read somewhere that this compensates for the lack of wind resistance one experiences through forward motion when covering distance (don't ask me if this is true, its just something I do). So, I figure I'd do a progression run of sorts, upping the incline after each successive mile for the first four miles and then bring it back down to '1' for the fifth mile (all at 6 minute pace).

I run the first mile at 6 minute pace keeping the incline on '1'.

For mile 2 I push the incline up to '2'. This gets more strenuous.

Nonetheless for mile 3 I push it to '3'.

Here I realize I won't be able to sustain another whole digit increase, so at mile 4 I push it to 3.5.

At mile 5, instead of taking it back down to '1' I push it up to '4'. I got this idea in my head that I'm not dying yet, so lets see how long I can hold out. I take it a tenth of a mile at a time. I'm dying here but manage to hang at '4' till mile 4.5

Here I take it back down to '2', meaning to keep six minute pace for the last half mile while tapering back down to '1'. This is still strenuous but I'm feeling myself recovering.

At this point an evil thought comes to mind. If I'm recovering here why not take the incline back up to '4' for the last quarter mile. So I crank it back up for the last .25 and now I am dying. To where its all I can do to hang on. Not since high school chemistry have I watched the clock as intensely only to see time move so slow. The odometer crawls a hundredth of a mile at a time. But I hang on and it was with immense relief that mile 5 rolled around.

I then took a real recovery mile with an even incline and a slowed down pace.

It wasn't until I got off of the hamster wheel that I realized how exhausted I was. It was a really intense workout, not only physically but mentally, as running this on the treadmill makes the miles all the more agonizing. Matthew Ryan was on the iPod to give me aural support. But I feel good, and all the more so as I figured out how to make a really good workout out of one that promised to be decidedly ho-hum.

7 miles in 44:52. Having given the mistress her due, I will now enjoy Valentine's Day with my sweetheart.