The First 5

Friday was an outdoor run by the Hudson River - a five-miler, the first real long run outside and a chance to test the treadmill's accuracy.  Result?  Treadmills lie to you every step of the way.
(I believe that it has something to do with the innate mechanisms  governing the machine itself, but that's another blog post.)

Friday turned out to be a great running day - weather-wise, we had just survived a large snowfall and the streets had enough time to become salted and cleared (thank you Bloomberg) - but only just enough.  The streetlight intersections had three-foot tall piles of grey-spotted snow piled up between the crosswalk joints, so that you had to either leap over the curb to cross the street, or carefully tip-toe your way through some seriously icy sludge and over to the other side before a little orange hand signaled the return of raging traffic (traffic which presented another adventure called "Drive-By Snow Splattering").

Shannon and I started out running from the lower West Side with the turn-around point destination being 46th Street, where the Intrepid resides.  Though it was cold, we warmed up pretty quickly and managed to chat the whole way.  This supposed "easy" run day felt comfortable - I felt like we were running perhaps a 16:00-min mile pace, considering how it felt to be on the treadmill the past two weeks at a 12:00-min mile pace.  The scenery was interesting - winter running definitely provides some experiences one cannot imagine encountering in any other climate.  The sight of the frozen river was one pleasant surprise; the sight of a half-naked fellow runner was another shocking surprise.  Let it be said: distance runners who train in the winter are either crazy, bad-ass, or have a serious addiction.

While the outdoor run was refreshing, it did compare to the treadmill on one particular point - the mental grit moments.  Reaching the halfway mark, I was glad to have Shannon with me as we traded stories about what to do when you hit a block of mental sludge on the automatic indoor road.  We experimented with a few techniques right then and there, like acuity skills (high knees, grapevines, running backwards), re-focusing form (propelling from the arms or from specific leg parts), and motivational visualization (crackheads are chasing you, or perhaps there's an eligible-looking bachelor ahead of you).  Before we knew it, we had arrived back at our starting point, and in a mere hour and 3 minutes.

Now, you can imagine our surprise when we sat down to log the results and discovered that we had been averaging a 12:45-min mile.  The surprise came not only from the fact the run had literally felt slow, but the realization that the treadmill had been training us at a deceiving pace, albeit effective.
Earlier, Shannon had asked me what the value of doing an outside run was, and while I couldn't clearly articulate why we should be braving the weather, I didn't need to explain it by the time we finished.

It was clear to both of us that we have to keep an eye out for lying machines from here on out.