Hello everybody!
Well, my 2 weeks in Hong Kong have been and gone. I had an absolutely wonderful time and upon arrival decided that running outside will be a bit of a challenge, given the poor air quality and humidity. So, I decided to give the treadmill a go.
The last time I stepped foot on a treadmill was about ten years ago, so I was a little nervous. I was also really not sure how the use the thing! Luckily it was fairly straight-forward. The treadmill is strategically placed facing the TV, so I could watch stuff whilst running. Annoyingly the TV wasn't playing ball, as all of the channels had a poor reception, so I had to just run for the first time staring at the wall ahead. As you can imagine, after 15 minutes I was bored to tears and stopped. I was also sweating buckets! Despite having the air conditioning on I was still super hot and sweaty. It made me appreciate battling the elements when I run outside in the UK - at least the wind has a cooling effect!
I ended up running about 4 times when I was in Hong Kong in total. The boyf does not do any cardio, but he does weights. So we decided that whilst one of us was working out, the other would be playing a video game on the TV, giving the other person something cool to watch, and then we'd swap over once the workout was complete. This made it a lot more fun, plus we could encourage each other for working out and for completing a particularly challenging map on the game.
I don't know whether it was because I was doing so much more activity than usual during the daytime, but I was struggling to get up to 5k on the treadmill. I think the closest I got was about 4.4k . Despite tinkering with the different modes on the A/C, I was still insanely hot and bothered, which I think was also affecting my performance. When I make my permanent move, I will buy a fan and dump it in front of the treadmill to give me a bit of extra staying power. I was logging my runs on RunKeeper, which said that I was covering the distance faster than I would normally. I think this may be because running on a treadmill obviously forces your body to maintain a constant speed, whereas running 'naturally' would have some variation - I imagine, anyway. I hope that sort of made sense? In any case, the treadmill will take some getting used to!!
I also went out for a run this morning. It was a bad idea as I was still a little dehydrated from the night before when I went out for a run. I was trying out a new location - a park a 20-minute walk from where I live. I'd seen beautiful photographs of it online and wanted to see it for myself. Long-story short, because I was dehydrated and not really feeling it, I gave up after only running a mile. I walked around the park for a bit afterwards though, taking lots of photos of the flowers. I think I would like to run this route again as it was beautiful, and lots of people were walking their dogs, too - and you all know how much I love dogs!!
Anyway. It's nice to be back more actively on this forum. I'm looking forward to reading all about everyone's parkrun's, graduation runs, and the newbies just starting out. Good luck to all of you!!
xxx
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