Long day

I had a lonnnng day today. I've been up since 5:30 a.m. and have a serious date with my bed at 11:30 p.m. I was at work till 9:30 tonight, and it's the unexpectedly long days like that that make me incredibly glad that I go to the gym in the morning! It's so nice to be done with my workout before I start my day. Yes, it does (usually) mean a 4 p.m. slump, but I always come armed with snacks (apple and peanut butter anyone? Perhaps a banana? Yogurt?) to keep me fueled though the workday.

All right, it's officially 11:30. I have a date with the treadmill (shh, don't tell my bed) for a 6-mile tempo run tomorrow (1 mile warm-up, 4 miles at 8:57 pace, 1 mile cooldown).

But speaking of the treadmill, my marathon-running boss pointed me to an interesting site that has conversions of speed on the treadmill to speed outdoors, depending on your incline on the treadmill:

Pretty cool, eh? So when you're running at a 6.7 mph on a treadmill at 1% incline (as I plan to do tomorrow...we'll see if my legs agree), the equivalent speed for that outdoors is more like running at an 8:53 pace outdoors, rather than 8:57. Increasing the incline speeds up your pace. You should check it out! I still don't quite fully understand it, but it is quite interesting.

I should mention that I always run at a 1% incline. You should run with at least a 1% incline whenever you're on a treadmill -- as it says above, if you run at a 0% incline, the effort is actually less than it would be outdoors. I've contemplated bumping up the incline to 1.5% or 2% from time to time, but get scared. Maybe one day when I'm bored and not training for anything I'll get wild and give it a try!

With that, good night!