Five-Mile Treadmill Pyramid Workout

Today I got in two very different, but very awesome workouts.

I’m starting to get so over cold-weather running. It wasn’t even that cold today, but I just didn’t feel like running the sort-of-cold weather, so I took my workout to the treadmill in my building. Jess had me doing 5 miles at an 8:30-8:40 pace. Five miles on a treadmill is still a little longer than my idea 3-4 miles on a treadmill, so I knew I’d have to mix things up a bit. According to my treadmill, a 6.9 pace was an 8:42 and a 7.1 pace was an 8:27, so the average pace was somewhere in between. I didn’t feel much difference between these different paces, but it was enough to keep me mentally engaged, knowing I’d get to mix up the pace each mile.

*Edited to add: you can, of course, change these speeds to reflect your own speed.*

[photo via Ashley]

Tonight I’d planned on my regular yoga class (hi, who am I that I now have a regular yoga class?!) at 8:30 with Annie, but Ashley talked me into an earlier class, the Lotus Flow 1 with Justin.

The class with Annie usually has 8-10 people, as it’s a later class, or, an undiscovered secret, as I like to think of it. I walked into this class, and there were 8 people in just the first two rows of a small room. I walked in a little anxious that this tightly-packed class wouldn’t be that relaxing but vowed, in the spirit of it being a yoga class, to try to be present in the moment and not think about how packed the class was.

Sure enough, it was a good class. The best takeaway, from the instructor, was to just let go. So many of us – especially crazy New Yorkers – set such high standards and just keep pushing and pushing and pushing until we get the results we want. In yoga, that can lead to injury. Justin urged us to take this feeling off the mat, too. Well, we’ll see, but it was still a nice lesson, especially for a class that I was looking to be a bit more restorative in comparison to the run I’d pushed in the morning.

Overall, the class was good, though Justin didn’t come around and adjust nearly as much as Annie does. Her adjustments are great, and help you get so much deeper into poses. We ran into her in the stairwell on the way out, and I apologized for cheating on her class.

What are your favorite workouts to balance each other out? Do you like tough yoga classes or more chill ones? (Team chill all the way here.)