Back on the Treadmill

The weather here right now is amazing. As we hover around the freezing mark it feels like such a nice reprieve from all of the cold temperatures. If I ran outside today I think I could have considered running in shorts! There is still an absolutely crazy amount of snow on the ground though...

I had a 1:30 run to do this weekend. Yesterday we decided to head down south towards Oliver for the day, so I just went out for a quick 30+ min run around the neighborhood. No issues with dizziness on this day, mind you, I had a much better breakfast which I'm sure helped. I strapped the Yak Trax on again and they worked really well. No slippage and I even booted it down a few hills to test them out. After that we headed off to Oliver to have lunch at the amazing Burrowing Owl winery and stopped in to pick up some wine that I had pre-ordered at Tinhorn Creek. There is a triathlon I am hoping to do here in May so I kept looking around to try and figure out what lake the swim is in, but I'm still not sure that I've figured it out. I know we drove around part of the bike course though!

Today it became a question of scheduling with my long run. My 1:30 run was another Marathoner`s Special - 20 minutes at a warm up pace, 30 min at a steady state pace, followed by 4 x 5:00 tempo intervals and 2:00 intervals at a steady state pace. Since I had to focus on pace so much I didn`t really want to run outside in the snow. Even with the Yak Trax on I`m still a fare bit slower than usual. So...treadmill at the Y it would be. The Y in Kelowna is only open from 10:00 to 5:00 and is about a half an hour away and my folks were keen to go for brunch at Quails` Gate winery. I couldn`t see getting the run done early enough for brunch so I figured I`d just run after eating. I had the most amazing West Coast eggs Benedicts:
Poached egg, smoked salmon, tomato, and spinach all on a potato rosti and topped with hollondaise. Yummy... Washed down with some Chardonnay. Talk about a fantastic brunch, but I wasn`t too sure about this being a pre-long run meal! After digesting to headed off to the Y and figured I would try my luck...

The Y in Kelowna has some pretty nifty treadmills. You can plug your iPod in and it has a very nifty screen that you can change to show you where you would be if you were running around a track, or if you were running a 5K course in the boonies. I found one of this treadmills to hop on. It wouldn`t let me set a time goal for more than 30 minutes, so I set it for 20 minutes - the amount I needed to warm up - and started running. I was right in front of a window looking down in to the pool so I was kind of neat to be staring at something else besides the folks in the weight room. I started fooling around with the goal settings on the treadmill and tried changing my goal to a 10 mi run. Ah ha, that will fool it past the 30 minute setting. Until the treadmill promptly announced at 25 minutes that my workout was up. Oops. I started back up again but all of a sudden I had to hit the bathroom...sigh...time for a break. The nifty treadmill was in use afterwards so I went back to one of the older models and this one didn`t seem to have the same time commitment issues so I set it up for a 60 minute run. There was a sticker just above the emergency stop button. ``Emergency stop strap use is mandatory.`` Oops. I was running along at my tempo pace trying to clip the thing on to my shirt because I was already breaking a time limit rule on the treadmill, I didn`t want to be breaking the emergency stop rule as well. The intervals made the time fly by on the treadmill. When I was on my second interval I was running along at a good clip, not really paying attention, and my hand snagged the emergency stop strap and all of a sudden my workout was up. Gah... I started the treadmill back up again but this time I left the emergency stop strap off. Anyhow, 1:30 run done...on the treadmill...and I didn`t even suffer from any GI issues from brunch!