After I wrote my nightly run post I started wondering why it has been so hard to run this week.
My diet is a bit off normal and I’m not getting enough sleep since the time change but even combining those two things it really didn’t seem to explain why I have been having such a hard time on the treadmill. So I started thinking about other things it might be.
And it clicked that I was running on a new treadmill. It could be that the old treadmill was out of calibration and I wasn’t as fast as it was telling me I was…but the few outdoor runs I have got in in the past couple months would seem to say it was ok. So maybe the new treadmill is calibrated wrong and giving too slow a reading? Seems unlikely though.
I knew I had leveled the treadmill when I got it but I got to thinking that maybe I only leveled side to side and didn’t check front to back…I put it where the old one was so there shouldn’t have been an issue…but maybe I should double check.
Duh.
The new treadmill has a longer deck so its back end is at a different spot compared to where the old treadmill was….leading to about 3/4 inch difference off level front to back (with the back being lower). So basically I was running against an incline that I hadn’t expected. After some playing around I figured out that this looks like around 2.5 to 3% incline more than what the display was telling me. No wonder it was hard to get moving.
While I feel a bit dumb for not checking that I feel a heck of a lot better about my running again…
Sigh.
On a positive note that means the speed work I did at up to 10 mph was a lot more impressive than I thought…
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