After more slacker time this week I finally managed to get on the treadmill and put in some miles tonight. First run since the weekend – I don’t really have a good track record going right now – especially with the 12 hour Lemming Loop coming up in just over a week. It is going to be tough.
I have been dreading the treadmill lately as it keeps beating the hell out of my legs. This is pretty strange for me as I used to regularly do pretty significant mileage on the treadmill without even thinking about it – I always kind of thought of the treadmill as my secret weapon but for the past few months it has kind of turned into my nemesis instead.
So I decided to make some changes tonight to try to get the treadmill runs back where they needed to be.
Change #1 – shoe lace changes…stick with me here…I changed up how the laces on my treadmill shoes are done up. I opened them up in the toe box so that they weren’t so tight in that area – I have been feeling aches there after the runs for a while but only with those shoes. So basically that set is too tight in the toe box and I wanted to open them up to reduce the pressure on my feet during impact.
Change #2 – I changed the treadmill to a much more firm deck. My treadmill can have spring or be very firm and I have been running with it set to have some spring hoping to reduce the impact on my legs. But I guessed that with my size the spring was just too much and the added flex of the deck actually increased the impact on my legs.
It is a bit of rookie mistake to make more than one change at a time but I figured I would try it out anyway.
Ok – with that said – lets see what happens…
And…it was pretty good!
I started slow to see if I could catch issues and stop the run quickly if I had made a catastrophic decision and then slowly started increasing the speed as everything seemed to be going well. In the end I did the 5 miles with 3 minutes of walking and a maximum speed 9 mph for 2 minutes.
My legs feel strong after the run and my foot that had been aching after runs is feeling very good as well. So it looks like both changes were positive – I have a lot of work to do to get back to where I want to be but at least I’m not dreading the next treadmill run.
Running continues.
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