Here’s what I’ve done on my treadmill this week…
On Tuesday, I did one of the Ifit.com video workouts called “Half Dome Interval”. The visual showed the bar graphs indicating the workout progress, and also a slide show of Yosemite national park. It was one of the “Premium” workouts. Honestly, I didn’t even look at the pictures. I only watched the bar graphs to see where I was during the workout. It was incredibly difficult with a top speed of 8 mph and top incline of 10! The incline during the 8 mph intervals was 4. I had to stop once during each of those intervals to catch my breath. I really like the Ifit workouts. The visual cues and the variety of the intervals during the workouts made them (mentally) easy to stick to.
Doing these treadmill workouts reminds me of when I first started doing my Spinervals bike workouts…they are really hard (physically) and I can’t quite keep up. Eventually, I got good enough on the bike to keep up with the bike workouts and it made me a better biker. I’m hoping the same thing happens with my running 🙂 BTW, the Spinerval folks also make Runervals DVD workouts. I plan on putting that on my Christmas wish list. I do love Coach Troy!
Today, I did a tempo run on the treadmill. I warmed up for 5 minutes at 6mph. Then I ran for 20 minutes at 7 mph. Then, I cooled down for another 5 minutes at 6mph. My hope is that by using 6 mph (pace of 10 min miles) for my warm up / cool down, it will become my long slow distance pace. (Currenly, my LSD pace is 11-12). It does feel fairly easy to me on the treadmill. Of course, running around Chapel Hill is hilly, so that slows me down alot during my long runs.
Back to my tempo workout…I started out listening to music on my mp3 player, but ended up getting rid of it as it distracted me from concentrating on my running. I wore my heart rate monitor and watched the HR display as I ran. My HR during the first half of the 20 minute effort was 165-171. It started creeping up to 175 during the second half. I tried experimenting with my stride to get my heart rate to go down. Didn’t have much luck with that, tho. I did focus on my running form the entire time, and tried to make the pace feel easier. It was mentally difficult to keep going on the treadmill for 20 minutes at a hard pace. When you are running on the road, there are things to look at, and intersections where you must stop to look for cars (a little bonus rest). When you are running on the treadmill, there’s nothing interesting to look at and no stopping to rest.
Until I figure out a proper plan for using the treadmill, I think I’ll do one Ifit interval workout per week (because it is hard and yet I enjoy it) and one tempo run per week (because it is hard, I don’t enjoy it, and yet I think they are good for me).
I googled “treadmill workouts for faster running”. I found an active.com article by Gale Bernhardt (author of my favorite training book). Here’s the link (I want to save it for future reference.) I also still need to do the HR test on the treadmill that she spells out in her book. Stay tuned…