uphill struggle

I really thought today would be hard - trudging to the treadmill in the garage at gone 9pm, just feeling sluggish and hard to find motivation. The cause, species conservation, is motivation, and the potential achievement is definitely motivation, but neither of these things managed to get me bouncing enthusiastically to the treadmill. I'd even allowed my mind to wander to this blog and how I'd blog about how hard it was today, before I'd even started the run.

So I needed inspiration, and it came from an unlikely source. Not from heroes of marathon running, or great motivational speakers of our time. But from my wife, who mentioned "Did you actually know that there are three levels of incline on the treadmill?"

My god it's easier on the flat setting. As you can guess - up to now I've always had it on the most uphill setting, and though I knew I was always running on an incline, I thought that was the only setting ... And I'd been wondering why just a bit of running was such hard work on the calves so early on.

So I feel a bit better now - 21 more minutes under my belt but my 1.5 minute run stints suddenly seem like they could easily have been longer, rather than such hard work as they had been up to now. Of course the small number of calories burned off have long since been cancelled out by the second glass of wine I'm now enjoying. Roll on April ...