The treadmill at my parents' house and I have a sort of love/hate relationship-- I hate running on it... but I love being able to still get a workout in when there's it's 40 degrees and raining, or there's a foot of snow on the ground, or when the temperatures dip to the single digits and I can't breathe! However, just running on the treadmill is torture, even with music. Some time ago, I realized that if I changed something every half mile, I could make it more than 20 minutes without going completely insane. Basically, by only thinking about surviving a 1/2 mile of boredom at a time, the run was broken up into manageable segments... plus 800m is my favorite length repeat and close to the length of 1 song (because if a song lasts longer than 3.5-4 min, I usually get tired of it, and advance to the next one).
However, thinking about running 10+ x 1/2-mile was still less than spectacular, and I still kept creeping up the pace so that I'd be done quicker. So, shortly after discovering my initial jedi mind trick (but mostly because my legs were dead after running a couple days in a row on a treadmill), I realized that I can't do an "easy" run on one. This left me with two options - (1) learn to be patient or (2) make my treadmill runs my tempo / speed days. The first is never going to happen... I've tried yoga... I can't handle savasana... so option two it was! I cam across this article from Running Times that gives some pretty good treadmill workouts.
Or, you could try my "favorite" treadmill workout: after a mile warm-up, begin at your marathon pace and increase the speed 0.1-0.2 mph every half mile until you end at around your 10k pace (for me, this usually works out to ~5-5.5 miles). The worst part of the workout is not the pace that you're running, but increasing the speed when you're already tired (even though you can't actually feel the slight increase, you know you hit the button)!
it is so interesting :)
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