It was only a matter of time before it happened. Today marked the end of my 5 year streak of not running on a treadmill. Shocking, I know, especially for someone who loves to run and lives in Canada, but I don’t really enjoy the treadmill – at all, actually – and I am not that committed to my running to want to get on the mill when weather is bad. Instead, I work around it. I juggle my training schedule around so that I run on days when weather is better than bad, I try to time my run around the forecasts for a particular day or I postpone or skip the run.

This fall, I sensed that we were in for a tough winter of running and I started to envision life on the treadmill once or twice a week so that I could keep up my mileage on nasty days. But I stayed tough; I continued to plow through whatever Mother Nature threw our way or I played around with my schedule. This seemed to work – until this week.

My run on Saturday was cold, so cold that a dry cough started during the night and I ended up with a tight chest the next day. I’m asthmatic and recognized the warning signs right away. “Don’t be an idiot,” they read. “You’re going to end up really sick if you run today.” So I didn’t. Temperatures dropped again yesterday and today; even a 15 minutes outdoor supervision duty at school had me coughing as the cold worked its way into my chest. I knew that running was, once again, out of the question. But I wanted to run. Mentally and emotionally, I needed to run. By evening, I packed my shorts so that I could make friends with a treadmill.

I have to admit that I was nervous to start. I thought of myself as a new runner so I started slowly and with a low incline. It didn’t take long to realize that I had a pace that was too slow for me and bumped it up a bit. Later, I increased the speed a little more after every kilometre, then every 500 metres until I found my happy pace. By the end, I think I nailed my tempo pace, which I held for 10 minutes without too much effort; maybe this needs to be a bit higher.

During the last 15 minutes of my run, I started to think about how I could use the treadmill in a more “interesting” way, one that is more condusive with my training goals over the next few months. Today’s run was a spontaneously planned progression run (I love progressions). I am also going to try a tempo run, different types of interval workouts and a steady state run. And I need to figure out how to incorporate the incline feature.

I guess this means that I’ll be back. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it either but I was able to get a fairly decent run in and, these days, that is all I really need.