Not *exactly* Forrest Gump...

To anyone who's known me for a while, the fact that I go running on my treadmill nearly every weekday will come as a bit of a surprise. I've always hated "canned" exercise, whether it's on a treadmill or swimming laps in a pool. I'd rather play the calories off with volleyball than feel like a hamster in a spinning wheel.

Back in April, though, I stepped on the treadmill one day, and just kinda kept going. I usually get 5 "treads" a week, though sometimes it slips to 4 if I've got an appointment on a weekday, or get sick, or have other real life things to tend to. For the most part, though, I can be found running very hard, going nowhere, 5 times a week.

Up until the end of June, I just hopped on, turned on the belt, and tried to blank out my mind for 30 minutes. But then something cool happened... I got a new iPhone 3GS. Aside from the utter coolness of the phone itself (which is considerable), it comes with Nike+ built in. For anyone who isn't familiar with it, Nike+ is a way to track how far and how fast you run. There's a transmitter that goes onto your shoe, and a receiver that goes in your iPod Nano. The iPhone 3GS, though, comes with the receiver already built into the body of the phone, so all you need to buy is the transmitter. Since I was already treading anyway, I figured I might as well try out the Nike+ thing.

Since my first Nike+ run on June 23, I've logged over 100 miles. I've burned over 12,000 calories! I'm still amazed at how responsive I am to the implicit encouragement of seeing my workout data on my computer screen. I can see when my pace fell, and when it picked up. I can see my improvement over time, both in speed and distance. (For scale, when I started out, back in April, I was only going ~1.5 miles. Now I'm up to nearly 3 miles. I started out walking, and now I'm running for most of the 30+ minutes.)

I still don't like the treadmill, and haven't found anything consistently entertaining on the TV to distract myself with, but on the days that I miss my run, I really miss my run. This week, 4 of the 5 of us in the house are sick with one kind of plague or the other. I spent a lot of yesterday resting as much as possible, and trying to convince myself that I wasn't really queasy. But somehow I still dragged myself up on the belt in the evening, and ended up posting one of my best times. I'm going to have to say that after 4.5 months, this is a habit that's here to stay! I've got to admit, too, that although I don't enjoy the run itself, I do really like the results I see. (The endorphins aren't half bad either)