Treadmill workouts

Today while waiting for a Telus tech to arrive and install a fibre connection, I killed some time by doing a walk on ye olde treadmill. I sweated like the proverbial pig (do pigs actually sweat a lot?), so a top priority now is getting a fan mounted to help keep my cool ‘n dry.

I put on The Proclaimers’ Sunshine on Leith, which remains a gem of a pop album and is great for working out to and also, just, you know, listening to. It was also long enough to meet my criteria of exercising for either 50 minutes or 5 km, whichever came first.

As it turned out, I hit the 5K mark before 50 minutes, making it the first time I’ve done so on the treadmill. I then kept up for another minute or so to get the 50 minutes, too. I’m really into fives, apparently.

This time I put the towel in a place where it wouldn’t slip away after the first few minutes, and this was good due to the aforementioned buckets of sweat.

Other than that, it was a good workout. I let the music and my thoughts absorb me, so the 50 minutes went by quickly. My pace was eight seconds faster and BPM was a little lower, so pretty good overall.

Stats:

Speed: 6 km/h
Incline: 10

Pace: 9:51/km
Time: 50:05
Distance: 5.08 km
Calories burned: 533
BPM: 144

In which I did the same thing as Sunday, swapping The Dark Side of the Moon with Wish You Were Here. As a bonus, this album is about four minutes longer. Toward the end I was getting a bit stupid and tired, but saw I was close to getting 500 active calories burned, so that became my new goal and necessitated me adding the Pink Floyd classic “San Tropez” to the mix. I hit 500 before the song concluded and celebrated by sweating copiously.

In all, this was my longest treadmill walk and my latest. I started at 9:13 pm and ended at 9:59 pm. At this time last night I was climbing into bed.

My pace also matched my ending time, ten seconds slower than Sunday, but I walked farther, so I call it even(ish). My BPM was lower, which was nice. My total time was exactly four minutes longer than the previous walk, which is weird.

The stats:

Speed: 6 km/h
Incline: 10

Pace: 9:59/km
Time: 46:11
Distance: 4.62 km
Calories burned: 502
BPM: 146

Today I would normally walk to the lake and do a 5 or 10K run (I’m currently doing 5Ks again as I build my stamina back up). It was cloudy, but without a real chance of rain, thought it was cool, hovering around 4-5 Celsius in the morning. I had breakfast, did some chores and thought about running and a persistent voice keep saying, “I don’t wanna.” And I listened to that voice, because I am fat and lazy.

Normally that would be the end of the story, but now I have my good friend, treadmill. I mulled over a few plans–maybe a combo of a walk and a run or something. I decided to start with a 30 minute walk on my now-standard settings of 6 km/h and a 10 incline (yes, it really is walking uphill all the way). I then put on The Dark Side of the Moon because I’ve been in a Pink Floyd kind of mood recently.

And then I decided to walk for the entire album. As a side note, the final track, “Eclipse”, is a rousing way to finish any workout. The choice of music seemed to inspire me, as I walked at a very brisk pace, finishing with the following stats:

Speed: 6 km/h
Incline: 10

Pace: 9:49/km
Time: 42:11
Distance: 4.29 km
Calories burned: 476
BPM: 149

By way of comparison, a 5K run usually nets me about 330 calories or so burned, so walking uphill definitely burns better, though it’s not as intense, given the lower BPM. But I sweat way more. Somehow it all evens out.

Anyway, it was a good workout and offered proof on how having the treadmill is too convenient for me to avoid exercise without feeling massive guilt. Well, so far, anyway. Hopefully it stays that way.

P.S. I have created a new tag cleverly called treadmill walks to record such events apart from treadmill runs.