Have I been away? Well, mentally maybe.

I had a very difficult spring in the mental health arena. I wasn’t happy with my work, which made it harder to do anything, including workout regularly. On Valentine’s Day, the woot.com was a treadmill, which Chris and I bought. Totally out of character for us. For something that important that costs that much, it’s more like the two of us to spend weeks (months? years?) agonizing over the right model, the lowest price, and if it’s something we can afford.

Putting the treadmill together was one of those experiences. You know, one of THOSE. We put it together almost entirely, realized we’d left something out, took it apart almost entirely, and put it back together. They’d changed the version of the treadmill, but not updated the instructions. Special. We did inventory before we started, and were missing a ton of screws, bolts, nuts, and washers that it said were needed. Chris ran to the hardware store before it closed, and picked up a bunch of the “missing parts”. What did we end up using? One bolt and one washer.

But the treadmill was great. Instead of having to get up at 6 to get to the gym to run half an hour, shower, and get home, I could get up at 6:25 and accomplish the same thing and more. The treadmill is in our front porch, so you get to watch the sun come up over the mountains. And, you can run at night! After the gym is closed, the treadmill still turns on. It’s amazing.

It’s also iFit compatible, which is pretty cool. iFit allows you to do a lot of customization to workouts on your treadmill, including mapping out an outside run and having your treadmill simulate it in terms of incline (decline if your treadmill does that). I haven’t subscribed to iFit, as I’m not really ready for that kind of monthly commitment.

Point of the story: the treadmill kept me running at least a little through the winter / early spring. After tax season, race season started and hasn’t really stopped, and that will be discussed next.