I Swear that Treadmill was Possessed

It *had* to be!

I attend the gym at work, which is in the basement, but nice nonetheless. There are about 10 treadmills. Like most gym-goers, I have a favorite treadmill, Trunhilde.

What? You don't name your treadmill?

Trunhilde is third from the door, in front of the TV that shows the news (HLN) nonstop; it's always closed-captioned, so I can read the stories. No matter how dull or uninteresting I find most news shows to be, reading always distracts me.

(A brief interruption about this -- the closed-captioning is much slower than the news stories. The captions were discussing men's prostate health, and the picture was a car blowing up. Not too sure those two were related.)

This is also one of maybe three treadmills that actually reads my pulse (they all have the option, but only a few actually work). So I like this one.

Well, Trunhilde was out of order for a while. I'm peculiar, but not obsessed. I used another treadmill for a few days, right next to Trunhilde, and went about my fitness.

I was feeling good today, had a nice carb-y lunch, drank 750 ml of lime Perrier (Sure, that's a sports drink!), then headed downstairs. Trunhilde was back online, so I hopped on.

I don't know what happened to Trunhilde. Some evil, nefarious, dope-for-brains technician messed her up bad! First off, she kept registering my pulse as 155 - 160, where it's always been 120. Secondly, she was WAY too fast!





I mean, really faster than she should have been. I set my normal speed -- 3.6/7 for walk, around 5 for run. I realized pretty quickly that Trunhilde's speeds were way, way too fast, despite what the digital readout displayed.

My legs ached. My right shin ached, and felt knotty for a while afterwards. Right now in my fitness regime I am walking 150 meters and running 250, at the aforementioned speeds. Normally, this is not a problem. Today, however, I had trouble -- it was as if I was going several tenths of a mile faster than the machine was set at. My lungs ached, and my stomach started feeling crampy, and I was sweating much more than usual. I couldn't get Gym Guy's attention to ask him to maybe jump on the treadmill next to me and pace me. I don't really have any other explanation other than faulty Trunhilde! And I hate to stop and move to another machine, because I am somewhat obsessively tracking my progress (pace and average speed) and if I don't go a whole 30 minutes or whatever, I feel I don't get a good average. So I decided to stick it out.

Did I do it? Hell, yes.

Did I finish my planned 2 miles? Hell, yes!

The walk out to my car was a little wobbly, though.