Things that go squeak on the run

Monday p.m. 5 mile run
Tuesday a.m. 30 minute spin

Treadmills suck.

I went to the Y yesterday to get my run in. The lungs, the lungs...so no outside running for me until they clear. My approach to running on the treadmill is to load myself up with as much outside stimuli as possible so that I can trick my brain into not getting bored, disconnecting itself from my skull, and leaving my body altogether to find a much more exciting host.

My Y has a room for the ladies only from 4:30-7:30 p.m., and they ask that women check in that room first for open treadmills before heading out among the general population. I'm new to the Y, and I don't want to step on any toes quite yet, so I'm still following the rules. So I went yesterday to the women's room of the Y, dropped my water bottle down in what appeared to be a water bottle space on the treadmill, cranked the MP3 player, and I was off.

About three minutes into the run, I realized several things. First, I had the television on in front of me, but I was listening to my MP3 player instead of the sound on the television...a girl can only have her earphones plugged into so many places, after all. It would be good if I could set the closed captioning on the television (see two paragraphs ago for reasoning), but I couldn't. My solution was to choose something I had seen before, so it wouldn't matter if I couldn't hear anything. Problem with that is that having seen the show before meant that I wasn't so excited to see it again (see two paragraphs above for why that's a problem).

Realization number two: I was making outrageous amounts of noise on the treadmill. I had noticed when I stepped on to the beast that it wasn't as sparkley as the treadmills in the general population room, but I thought I'd give it a whirl anyway. Well, I was squeaking. Or the treadmill was. Every single step of my 6.6 mph run was making an outrageously loud squeak. This must have been annoying to the other people in the room, but it was the machine, for crying out loud. However, see the bit about not stepping on toes.

Okay, there were other things. The water bottle holder was just a giant pocket in the machine, so every step was also causing my water bottle to rattle. Rattle, squeak, rattle, squeak, huff, puff. You get it.

We have a 30 minute limit on the cardio equipment. I've gotten dirty looks for staying on a bit long even when people weren't waiting. That's a whole other story, though...I'll get to my interpretation of that rule at some point. So I stuck it out for the 30 minutes in the womens' room. Sigh of relief. Then, I moved to finish my run in the general population, sparkly, Emerald City treadmill room. Never again am I going to be in that chick room first. If they want me to be in there, they should move the good stuff in there, as well. Harumph.