Tuesday, November 21, 2006

The joys of metric

Having wussed out to November in Edinburgh, I sucked it up, coughed up £2.50 for a one-time pass at the gym, and got back on a treadmill. I must say, it was nice to run glove- and fleeceless for a change, but I had a bit of a nasty shock when I started programming the machine.

I know Precor machines - they're what we primarily had at Yale, and they're pretty intuitive. I had run on treadmills identical to the one I chose this morning, and I knew what speed settings I can do. When I started running the numbers today, however, the first thing it asked for was weight. 68kg? Higher? Lower?

This was not boding well. I just accepted it and moved on to the speed component, but found that my usual rate - somewhere in the 6.7 neighborhood - wasn't cutting it. Crap, I thought, jogging in place and glaring at the console, I don't do metric before breakfast. It's just not right.

There was one plus to the funky metric-calibrated machine, which was that I seemed much more hard-core than I am. After half an hour, I had run almost five kilometers at 9.2 km/h, which sounds much better than 3.1 miles at 6 mph.

I knew that didn't feel like 9.2.

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