I've been running at least two days per week on my home dreadmill, right beside my favorite "Motivational Poster"...this is the one that says "INEPTITUDE - if you can't do something well, then learn to enjoy doing it poorly".

                                                                

These two runs on my dreadmill - Monday and Wednesday mornings - are longer, harder runs; Monday has been 8.5 miles for the last few weeks with 6 of those miles at a "tempo" pace, while Wednesdays have been 12 milers with repeats.

I'm not posting the speed at which I'm doing these workouts in this blog entry, for two reasons:

1) I'm sorta ashamed to be doing "quality" workouts at these paces (much slower than just a few years ago) and
2) I don't really believe what the treadmill is telling me, anyway - I suspect that I'm really slower than the slow speeds that it is reporting.

Thus, were I to be specific about the times and distances for these workouts, then I would be both disgracing myself because the peformance is so poor, and lying about it at the same time. Neither option tickles my fancy (my fancy's never been that ticklish anyway).

Having said that - I will say that the workouts seem to be helping, in that my distances are getting farther, and my speeds are getting faster, week to week. Assuming that the dreadmill is wrong, I can still at least hope that is is consistent, i.e. wrong in the same amounts or proportions. Thus, even if the values aren't absolute, the training itself is making me less slow than I was before.

But now I have a problem - I have a race this coming Saturday. And those race results threaten to undo my pleasant fantasy by providing actual, accurate, numbers - numbers that I won't like one little bit.

Understand - I'm not expecting a PR. In fact, in all honesty, I am expecting a PW (Personal Worst). But I'm hoping that said personal worst won't be too bad, while fearing that - oh, yes, it will be.

Now, that in itself isn't such a bad thing; I mean, to be "disillusioned" is to learn the truth, after all.

But the problem is Gilligan's Wings.

There was one episode of Gilligan's Island where Gilligan had built some wings, a la "Daedelus & Icarus" style, and had put them on and was actually flying, hovering in the air beside a coconut tree. The Skipper looked up at Gilligan, flying there, and said -

SKIPPER: Gilligan! What are you doing? You can't fly!
GILLIGAN: I can't?
SKIPPER: No, of course you can't!

...whereupon Gilligan fell out of the sky.

This has happened to me, indeed - some years back, I was doing some pretty good workouts on my treadmill (the old one - the one that I trusted) in my basement in Park City; I was doing 8-10 miles or so on hard days during the week, at 6:50 pace or so, and that was at an elevation of 7000 feet (I trust all of those numbers :)

However,  when I posted this information to the Dead Runner's Society, a young fellow who (at that time) was an active member of DRS, Alejandro Munoz del Rio, explained to me that those paces weren't really accurate reflections of performance, because (as he said) dreadmills don't have wind resistance; thus (he said) I was supposed to ramp up my treadmill to 1.5% incline, and then see what pace I was running - because, according to the charts,  at that pace, the difference was supposed to be something like 16 seconds per mile.

Huh.

And Alejandro was a mathematician - not only that, but he was a FOREIGN mathematician, and we all know that they are smarter than our regular American mathematicians. So I couldn't ignore what he said - it had to be taken into account.

So, on the next hard day, I set the incline to 1.5%, cranked up my mill, and tried to run - and the wind went right out of my sails. I couldn't run anything LIKE the same pace that I was running; not only that, but I couldn't run as far, either, and it was nowhere near as much fuh.

Gilligan fell out of the sky.

In fact, that shot me down for the year - finding out that I wasn't really running 6:50 pace meant that I couldn't run hard at all; I didn't have any mojo. No motivation. No oomph.

Robert Persig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, talks about "gumption traps" - situations that you can get into, while you're working on your motorcycle, that can take the enthusiasm and fun right out of the whole experience. That's what happened to me - a gumption trap.

Nowadays, I run with my dreadmill set to 1% grade (turns out that 1.5% is actually a bit too steep to be really equivalent ; the charts I say now say that 1% is as close as I'm gonna get - in fact, it turns out that there's a lot of controversy over whether or not the whole discrepancy between treadmill paces and road paces really exists) so that I can avoid that particular gumption trap. And I've done what I can to calibrate the dreadmill - I've measured the belt and run it for a while, counting the number of times that the belt completed the loop and comparing that number, times the length of the belt, to the distance reading on the console - I can't get any consistent error showing up that way.

I have found what seems to be a clock error - it seems that 16:30 seconds on the dreadmill clock is actually 16:34 seconds, so - at 8 minute pace - that's two seconds/mile. Not enough to concern myself with these days.

But still, running outside on the roads, I'm not able to run as fast as I can on the dreadmill. That might be because, by the time I get outside, I'm already exhausted from running two hard days on the mill :) - but I really do believe that the dreadmill numbers are wrong.

But, even if they are wrong, then, if they are consistently wrong, then I've been improving, and - even though "improving" at this level means going from "really slow" to just  "slow" - I LIKE improving.

And I"m afraid that, if I do this race on Saturday, then I'll see dramatic, incontrovertible evidence that my dreadmill numbers have been wrong, and that - once again - I'll fall out of the sky, and into a big gumption trap :)