Help me raise $500 for the homeless through the charity Back on My Feet.
I pronate…severely. I also strike with my heel often. Frustratingly, when I’m on the treadmill, I cringe at the idea of running, as I know it will be a constant battle to execute correct. To be honest, I’ve always been a a terrible runner. I mean, I have been easily one of the worst at running properly, especially when there is no end goal. It is one thing if I am trying to catch a ball, or run after a someone in a game. It is a completely different animal to run for the sake of running.

Oddly, I love biking. It feels like a complete escape, in part because it takes half the time it would to run to get lost. I say “get lost” in a literal sense, as I, when I lived back in the suburbs, prided myself on finding ways to get completely lost and in a location I did not know. Those moments, where I could ride in curiosity with no predetermined idea of where I was going, were the most satisfying. They became rarer and rarer the older I got, as I learned pretty much every backroad within a 30 mile radius of my parents’ house.

So to tackle my running problem, I started looking to my own enjoyment of cycling. I have always enjoyed the hills, as I would “dance on the pedals” as Phil Liggett would say, against an ever-steepening gradient. I realized that this same feeling has come to me over the past several weekends where I have hiked up steep, snowy hills.

Tonight was the first night where I took those same principles and applied them to the gym. I raised the incline and began to sprint. It was exhilarating and exhausting, in the best way possible. I also realized that it absolutely forced me to run the right way, on the balls of my feet with long. It helps that I have support shoes (Asics), but in all honesty, it took raising the difficulty and the gradient to get the burn and engagement in my running that I effortless have in biking.

Below you can see that my heart rate today (last synched at 9:50 PM) was much more consistently elevated given this change in my workout. The only time where the same sustained effort is evident is on the weekends (hence my three hour hikes with my dog). Looks like I found a new way to keep improving my fitness.


As an aside, the actual maximum heart rate tonight was around 161 bpm (a far cry from when I could do 180+ sophomore year of college), but this chart is meant for trending, so it is not going to reflect outliers.