Cursed Realm of the Faceless Ghost

More treadmill miles. I'm coming up with a running schedule that I think will work well throughout the semester, but I won't share any details until I've tested it out. 

Anyway, tonight I ran five miles and change: two at 8:30 to warm up. two at 6:30 to make me less slow, and almost one at 9:00. At the end I decided to kick it up to 5:00 for 0.2. I might have kept it up longer, but I was afraid I might fall off the back of the treadmill.  

Score one for Gold's Gym in Orem.

After hearing Catherine tell me about the new treadmills with their extreme incline I knew I had to check them out. And they're everything I've ever wanted and more, at least out of a treadmill. The key feature is that the incline ranges from -3 to 30 percent. That means I can log some Grandeur-style vertical and train my legs to run downhill, all indoors. Sweet.

So, for today's workout I jogged a mile at 8:30 to warm up, then I put the incline through the paces by cranking it up to 30 percent for a mile. I tried to do the whole thing at 3 miles per hour, but that was pretty rough, so I slowed down to 2.5 for a tenth of the mile near the end.

For the record, I really am excited about these treadmills. They'll make it a lot easier to stay in shape for the mountains in the summer. Now we just need to get a few of them at the gym here in American Fork. 

Thirty minutes on the treadmill with fifteen minutes of tempo thrown in,

Another thirty minutes on the treadmill, tonight with about 20 minutes on the 10 percent grade.

Looking back, it was a long, busy, stressful day. So I guess that when I finally got a chance to run aroundmidnight, I had a hard time talking myself into heading out into the cold. But I did go, so I guess there's that.

I ran my Corner Canyon loop this morning.I felt pretty sluggish the whole time, thanks to poor eating yesterday and poor sleep last night, but I still had a good time.

I decided to bring my microspikes with me, and it was the right call. There were sheets of ice covering most of the lower portions of Hog Hollow, and plenty of snow and ice on the Draper side. The traction with the spikes is incredible. Unlike a couple of weeks ago on Lake Mountain, when I kept falling even when I slowed to a walk, I was able to run fast and easily across pure ice--very cool. But I'm still going to return the spikes. 

The problem is that they pull in on the toe box of my shoes. Since my run, all of my toes are blistered, and the middle toenail on each foot is blacked out from where the chain on the microspikes rests directly on my toes. I've been going around barefoot because it's too painful to wear shoes. So while I love how the microspikes work, the cost is not worth it. I'm not sure what I'll do for icy runs, but it will have to be something else.