Eyes front, chin up, elbows in, headphones on

I missed a couple of days on the treadmill (don't plan to obsess over this, but I also don't intend to skip a lot of days), and it showed on the scale. All this at the time I should be adding miles in the train-up to the mid-March half marathon.

So, this afternoon I tried something a little different. I climbed on the treadmill, and set it for my typical three 10-minute miles with warmup and cool down. Then, as it started rolling, I covered the treadmill's readout, and took off my specs for extra measure, so I couldn't check progress. I put the mp3 player on shuffle and jogged away. I stopped counting songs after seven (that's when I peeked at the display and saw that the three miles was more than half gone). Then I just decided to run until the belt stopped, which it did at the end of 34 minutes, partway through Planeta Sukri by Sara Tavares. I cranked it up to speed again, to see how many more songs I had in me. After another mile (Ship of Fools by Grateful Dead, and part of Tu Recuerdo Y Yo by Lila Downs), I cranked the belt down for a two-minute cooling walk.

By looking straight ahead (mostly), and being mindful of my stride length, my arm motion and respiration rate, and most of all, listening closely to each song, I paid a lot less attention to fatigue and the countdown clock.

OK, so that's what I'll do on everyday runs whenever time permits: cover the odometer, go as far past 3 miles as time and temperament allow, then run an increasingly longer distance each weekend, according to our training calendar.

The Countdown to Tom King 1/2 Marathon March 13

Days until TK	Miles logged today	Comments
62	4	treadmill - with tunes!