6 Treadmill Workouts for Runners

When the cold weather hits there's often no choice but to hit the treadmill to get a run in. Most of the time I'd rather run through cold, wet and dark conditions instead of run on the treadmill. But when icy footing gets in the way of a planned workout I often head to the treadmill. The only problem: I get bored easily and when I'm bored, treadmill runs seem to take twice as long! Usually playing around with the pace and incline makes things interesting enough to pass the time more quickly.

Embrace the Hill

One of my favorite workouts to do on the treadmill is an incline workout that gradually gets harder. After an easy ten minute warm up, you continue to increase the incline by 2% every 2 minutes until you reach 12% incline and then head back down. I start at one minute slower than my recovery run pace (recovery pace is about 3 minutes slower than 5K race pace) and *try* to keep the pace the same throughout the run. Often though around the 12% incline mark I slow the pace because it just gets HARD. It is better to slow the pace than to grab the handrails to help yourself keep up.

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