I AM INVINCIBLE NEENER NEENER.

I bought this advanced 10K training plan off Runner's World.  I bought it to help me gain some speed before my next round of half-marathon training begins.  I can't stand buying that kind of stuff, because, for 20 bucks, I got some words on a screen in a neat little calendar-planner thing that has more features than I'll ever use.  Maybe I'm a little old school with my whole "I plunked down electronic cash via an online transaction so I want something tangible in return" attitude, but I really get annoyed paying for that kind of stuff.

But I did it anyway. Because they had already lured me in with one of their free (and awesome) intermediate half-marathon training plans.  That plan helped me realize my running dream of a sub-2-hour finish in my last half-marathon, and I came in at my goal pace right on the dot. (After re-reading this, it makes it seem like this plan made that half-marathon easy.  It wasn't.  There was a lot of shameless mental begging with any god who would listen to keep my numb legs moving in the last 2 miles.)

But my mistake, you see, lies not in the fact that I paid hard-earned electronic money for this plan.  Did you notice the word "advanced" next to the word "10K" in the first sentence?  Yeah.  That mistake.

Maybe I was still on the high from my half marathon (which was Thanksgiving weekend) when I purchased this plan, but after I put it in the little planner thingie to which my 20 bucks also gave me access to (although you must pay MORE to schedule workouts ahead of time.  REALLY?), I took a good hard look at it.  Here's pretty much my thoughts while giving it a once-over:  "Easy runs...uh-huh....some long runs....awesome....2 days of speedwork a week, mostly intervals.....bring it......a few rest days.....Cool.  I just ran a half-marathon in under 2 hours and I CAN DO ANYTHING I AM INVINCIBLE NEENER NEENER."

I started the plan today (well, technically it started yesterday with a rest day), which began with some intervals. Feast your eyes if you will upon what it says to do today:

2 x 1200 meters at race pace
2 x 800 meters at race pace
4 x 400 meters at race pace
6 x 100-meter strides
After a warmup, run each interval at your 10-K goal pace. After the intervals, do strides.

My 10K goal pace isn't something crazy insane like 5 minutes/mile, but it's tough for me.  Tough enough that, when I hopped on the treadmill to do these intervals, reality set in.  While the warm-up was all rainbows and unicorns, the first 1200 repeat had me in serious doubts about this workout.

Maybe I wasn't as "advanced" as I thought if I wanted to sit down on the treadmill belt so it would carry me to the ground instead of having to expend any more of my own ATP to do that.

The only thing I could think of to do in order to finish was to cover up the little 400 m rectangle of evil in the treadmill display with some post-its that happened to already be on it from my half-marathon training.  I had to bury the pain under paper. I couldn't bear to watch that little hellish rectangle light up square by square by square in painful running-workout slow-motion.  I would only allow myself to look at the miles, so that way in order to know when each interval ended my mind had to be occupied with math (it takes me a long time to do math.  Even simple math).

There's nothing like a few 1200 m or 800 m repeats to make you beg to do 400s.

I finished the workout in 90 minutes.  My hammies were screaming and my left Achilles is whining and I have iced lots of body parts this evening, but I made it.

But I am no longer invincible.  Neener neener.

So I got this stationary bike thing.

So I got this stationary bike thing for Christmas.  A NordicTrack one, the GX2.0.  Nothing screams "I love you" or celebrates Jesus' birth quite like a stationary bike.

I didn't ask for one, but my husband, knowing how much I love to alternate biking with running when the weather is nice for about 3 seconds per year here in Illinois, got me a stationary bike so I can still do this during the winter.  Last year he got me a treadmill so I can run in the winter as well.

I can now not only run to nowhere, I can bike to nowhere as well.  I was actually perversely excited about this.

We put it next to the treadmill in my itty-bitty workout "room," so now my treadmill has someone to talk to and doesn't have to stare out the back window at the empty farm field through the sheers all the time.  I am sure they will become good friends.

BFFs!

After we let those two get acquainted, I hopped on the bike to grab a workout.  It was quiet.  Too quiet.  I don't know what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting "quiet."  This thing is an EXERCISE MACHINE, dammit.  It was EXPENSIVE.  It should make lots of stationary bike noise to match the tremendous amount of calories I was burning.  It should groan along with my grunts to tell any person or escaped farm animal that happened to be walking through the empty field behind my house that we are WORKING OUT and we are SERIOUS about it.

Instead I pedaled quietly along.  Pedal, pedal, pedal.  Quiet, quiet, quiet.  I thought I heard the treadmill chuckle softly.  Or maybe it was just one of my dogs snoring away somewhere.

I decided to try one of the pre-programmed interval workouts on the bike.  I chose a speed-interval one over a resistance one, because I am a masochist and am starting a 10K training plan soon and didn't want to wear out my legs for all of the speed intervals I would be doing.  It kept bouncing me between the mind-boggling speeds of 13 mph and 14 mph, and playing with the resistance as well.  But it wasn't anything too tough.

Pedal, pedal, pedal, quiet, quiet, quiet.  Ho-hum.  Kinda easy.  How anticlimactic.  I feared the bike would have little to say to my loud and noisy treadmill.

That is, until I had pedaled for about 20 minutes. I looked down and several rogue beads of sweat landed on my shirt after they rolled off my brow.  They joined a few thousand other ones that already there.

It seems I was getting a workout.  My heart rate was at about 160 when I gripped the silvery heart-rate-measuring thingies on the bike.  Quiet but effective, this stationary bike was.  It was all action and little talk.  I can respect that in a piece of workout equipment.

I have been using the bike on days where I do weight work, and it's a great low-impact cardio workout that's easy on this runner's knees.  Maybe it will give me the courage to sign up for that triathlon I've been thinking about doing for the past 2 years or so.

Or maybe it will make the treadmill jealous.  I guess we'll see soon enough.