Treadmill Hell

I decided to rearrange my basement, two months ago. I set the home gym up in a spacious corner, and it looks and functions great. However, ever since I did this, I started having terrible trouble getting in my cardio on the treadmill, each day. And my timed miles were taking so much longer. My lungs burned, my legs burned...I couldn't complete my workouts. WTF?? I started thinking it was exercise-induced asthma. Then, I thought it was too warm in the basement, and bought a big fan to blow on me while I ran. I couldn't figure it out. I actually was brought to tears, last week, trying to improve my 2-mile time. I was so frustrated. I was ready to go to my doctor to see what was wrong with me. Part of me thought it was all psychological...maybe because my dad has lung cancer, I now feel like I can't breathe, either.

Well, today, I checked out the treadmill, because I couldn't fold it up. I had the incline set to 1%...this is the lowest it goes. Something was wrong. It really looks like it's on an incline! But it's reading 1, so ??? So then I put the incline all the way up to 10, and lowered it back down to 1. That treadmill went way, way down!! I must have done something when I first moved it that reset the readout to 1 while on an incline!! I was so happy, I was in tears laughing. It's not me!! It's not my fault!! I estimate that incline was probably 4-5%, for the past 2 months that I tried to do my normal (and difficult) cardio workout. No wonder my timed runs sucked so bad!!

I got on that SOB, and ran my two miles straight, no stopping, no walking. I made it in 19:20. Yay!! I know I can beat that time, too, but I was just thrilled it didn't take me 25 minutes, like last week!

All that time, I thought I was out of shape, or had asthma.  Screw that!!  :)