Chad Wemhoff, at LPTA called me the beginning of November asking whether I knew about them and if he got one did I think runners would like it. Like it? They would LOVE it! He got the treadmill last week and I went in bright and early on Monday morning to test it out. I am not at all a treadmill fan, to be honest I have ran on one a couple times and never for more than a few minutes, plus this treadmill is in the center of their facility and I thought I might be self conscious. Nope, not at all, didn’t care one bit once I got on the thing at 85% of my body weight and began running faster than I have since I started back running a couple weeks ago. This thing is amazing and very fun! I seriously did not want to get off.
It is a crazy contraption but really not that cumbersome. You put on these crazy neoprene shorts with a big plastic lip around the top of them, you step onto the treadmill and zip yourself in, the treadmill calibrates your weight as the air fills the inside of the plastic you have zipped into. You decide what percentage of weight you want to take off and away you go! I played around with it – at 50% I felt like I could barely keep my feet on the treadmill, I was way up on my toes. At 75% it was almost too easy, but at 85% it was great! I could run fast again (something I was beginning to doubt would ever happen)! Now this puppy isn’t a cheap form of training at $1.00 a minute, but Chad is working on a “runners plan” where you would pay so much a month and you would have x of amount of time on the treadmill each week – sign me up! I am headed there in the morning and plan to do fast stuff on the Alter-G until I am comfortable running fast outside.
Coming back after this injury I knew I was going to have to come up with a plan to get my legs fast again and I have found it! Each injury forces you to think “outside the box” when you start up running again. Sometimes you can jump right back into it and sometimes not so much. But I truly believe each injury makes us smarter if we let it. Every professional I go to I listen, learn and file away what they tell me. There are so many smart people out there and we, as runners, need to utilize them! I take so many things I have learned over the years and transfer them to my collegiate athletes – pulling those little things I have learned out and applying them to the NWU runners saves us many a big injury by nipping it in the bud. I really work on them to tell me when something first bothers them so we can get on it right away. They have learned the difference between an injury and just hurting – which is a huge thing to learn as a runner!