**TL;DR: ** A lot of runners dislike the treadmill. I get why, and it’s not my first choice, but I still appreciate the mental challenge, and I had a good treadmill run today.

Last January I started running.

Undoubtedly there will be more about that later.

There will probably be so much about that later that if you are not a runner you will second guess your decision to read this blog. But for now stick with me. We can jump off that bridge when we get to it.

Anyway. Last January I started running.

I did most of my running on a treadmill at a gym. In the early weeks of the couch-to-5k plan I used, you don’t run more than a few minutes at a time. Wanting to die for a for a few minutes is a feeling you can power through. In fact, you can learn to enjoy powering through it. So the treadmill wasn’t so bad.

After a month, there were two key changes. First, my stomach was no longer the protruding jiggling mass that in the early days would, a couple of times per run, accidentally flop onto the emergency stop button and bring the treadmill to an abrupt halt. Second, the times I had to run increased to like 20-25 minutes. Still, it was highly doable with a decent music mix. In full disclosure, after I got bored with my own mix, I started using the ridiculous motivational electronic music on Spotify’s “House Workout” mix. It was horrible music but it worked. So again, the treadmill still wasn’t so bad.

Once I graduated to running outside in March, and I started running 3 or 4 miles regularly, I never really went back to the treadmill.

My running has gotten a lot more serious since then (regularly and easily running 5 or 6 miles, and a 10k under my belt). So today, I made the game-time decision to do a treadmill run. I only had a little over an hour, the sidewalks were icy, the wind was 24mph and freezing, and I forgot my contacts. Any one of those things wouldn’t have been enough to bag the outdoor run, but, those things combined, so I decided to take my first treadmill run since last March. It was surprisingly hard. I totally had lost all the mental capacity to do a treadmill run. I managed to do a decent warm up, ran a mile, then got some speed work in. But I know I wouldn’t have been able to go much longer than 40 minutes.

Honestly, it was sort of a good thing I had gone to meditation class last night, because it did at least give me a bit of a mental edge.

I can’t remember what the point of writing this was, but it seemed worth sharing at the time.