Treadmill Delusions
Don’t trust your treadmill, it could be misleading you.
In winter, when the snow, cold or icy roads prevent me from running outside, I fill up a water bottle and head down to the basement to run on the treadmill. I select either Netflix or YouTube and choose a video that will keep me distracted. I press the start button and jump on as I slowly increase the speed.
My preferred running distance is 10K. The duration allows me the opportunity to enjoy an episode or half of a movie, yet it is not so long as to feel tedious going nowhere. I follow the display to monitor the distance covered. For the training time, I prefer to use the GPS watch my spouse gave me on our anniversary last year. At the end of my session, I stop my watch to capture the day’s accomplishment. Later, the data uploads automatically on the Garmin online platform.
A few months ago while running in the basement, I noticed that the time on my watch was about 14 seconds slower than the treadmill time. That was a pleasant surprise, as it meant I was faster than it led me to believe. As I trusted my watch to be of higher accuracy, I did not ponder the variance any further.
Recently, I acted as the timekeeper for my spouse who was completing a 5K time trial on the treadmill. As I shouted the minutes and seconds for her first kilometer…
