Weekend Vacation and a Stupid Treadmill

This weekend my wife and I were invited to come be part of the staff for a marriage and commitment seminar. We attended the course several years ago and since the seminar was so close to our anniversary we opted to celebrate our Anniversary by being on the staff.
I normally bring my laptop with me on vacation so in case an emergency arises (aka there is nothing on TV worth watching) I can still stay in touch. But, I showed my wife that I was totally committed and left it at home. I did bring along my blackberry and I only had to call home once to walk my son through the process of sending a pdf to a client. I'd say I did pretty well.

On Friday morning, we got up and headed to the fitness center. I thought about just hitting one of the paved bike/run trails, but again this was an opportunity to be with the wife and the fringe benefits involved with keeping her happy were worth being indoors. Even though this hotel was nice, their fitness room seriously lacked.

I stepped on the treadmill and hit start planning on increasing the speed until I felt that I was at a good pace. The point of this run, was to just loosen up the limbs and remind my body that it does this sort of stuff on a regular basis. The treadmill starts and I hear this groaning creaking sound as if the bearings haven't been used in a long time or the team of hamsters running the machine haven't been fed lately. The increasing the speed was rather bland then the wife suggested I run one of the pre-programed training options. It's been a while since I did Intervals on the treadmill and I thought it would be interesting to see where I am at now compared to winter.

Have you ever noticed that on a lot of the machines, they don't actually tell you the speed. You can't type in that want to run intervals at a 7:00 pace and then a 9:00 jog? NO....you have to type in a number that has no correlation to your actual speed. On some machines I type in '6' and it's all I can do to say upright. On others, I'm hitting that same mark at '9' or '10'. After some messing around, I found that '8' gave me a pace that was faster than what I normally run. That is where I set the max speed to and hit start.

It started at a 3.5 and I'm thinking that this is just a little walking to get the muscles stretch a little. The display showed peaks and where I was in the process. The first peek was coming closer and closer and I was still at a 3.5. All of the sudden it peaks to '8' and I about lose my footing. I get into a rhythm and the display shows that I am done with the peak. I was expecting it to drop to maybe a 6.5 or 7, but it dropped back to 3.5. I find myself walking again. This wasn't working. I manually bumped the speed up to 6.5 and then it went to 8 when the peak came. At the end of the peak, it dropped back down to 3.5. I bumped it back up again. After 20 minutes and 3 miles I hit stop, kicked the machine and told my wife I was heading to the room to shower. She was having issues with the "all in one" weight machine and gladly followed me up.

I'm thinking about writing my local congressman to see if he can get some legislation in the works to standardize the numbering on all treadmill machines or maybe they can include a spot in the upcoming healthcare legislation that requires treadmill companies to post their number equivalent on the machine so that I know what the heck a '6' or an '8' are.