Bad Weather, Worse Treadmills

I got back on the road this week after a few months of dillying and dallying about it. I went out for a very brief 2 miler on Tuesday afternoon and it went well. Weather was OK; cloudy and breezy, around 38 or so. Not bad but not great or inspiring. But 2 miles was more than enough for my out of shape body and my legs were SORE the next day.

Thursday I was hoping to get back outside again for another 2 miler to continue my body's transition back to exercise but the weather turned awful on Thursday: highs in the upper 30s but with winds in the 25-30 mph range. It could have been worse: they had forecast that the blizzard that hammered New England and New York was going to dump 5 inches or more here. But thankfully it barely rained here, much less snow, so if my alternative is windy snow or wind, I'll take just wind. But I stayed indoors and ran on the treadmill instead and man did it suck.

Many people have no problems with a treadmill, but I am not one of them. In fact, I hate treadmills. Not only because of the monotony of running in place for potentially an hour or more either. No, I hate the treadmill because my lower legs always hurt when I run on a treadmill. I think it's a function of my body trying to stay on the belt and making weird adjustments to my gait, posture, etc to do it. But every time I get on a treadmill, the muscles along the outside of my calves start to burn within a few minutes and it just gets worse for about a mile or so until the pain just ebbs away from numbness. It really sucks and it makes me absolutely despise running indoors. As a result, I only got through 1.5 miles of my run on Thursday before I got outdone with the whole thing and bagged it.

So, from now on, I'm going to just suck it up and run outside in just about any weather. If it's too bad to run outside, well I'll just do some cross training that day instead. It's a waste of a perfectly good workout to run on a treadmill and then have your lower calves ache the day afterward.

Anyway, I didn't do anything today to give my body time to recover from this limited amount of running. I don't want to repeat what I did in the summer and try to run too far too soon and get injured and then not be able to run for 3 or 4 weeks. I'm just taking it slow and maybe next week I'll start doing more cross training on my non-running days to get that program started.

And with next week's forecast calling for sunny skies and temperatures at least a little closer to normal (average for this time of year is 50...today's high was below 40), I'm hopeful I won't ave to layer up for any of my runs next week and can just stay in shorts with layers on top.