February: Vanity

   In hell, runners will be dispatched to the treadmills, plodding at the canter of carriage horses, using iPods as blinders. You've seen this fate rehearsed down at your local gym. It's no wonder that running snobs consider the treadmill to be a kind of death. The treadmill mocks the very reasons many of us love running: all the drudgery without the gratifying challenge of terrain, weather, and boundless horizon.

   You only deprive yourself with such thinking. Treadmills give you uncanny precision in controlling the load, intensity, and pace of your workouts. They let you cheat allergies, driving rain, ice, and high-summer air pollution. When positioned before a mirror, they shine an unambiguous view of your form during early and late stages of a workout – indispensable information for distance runners. They provide a softer landing than terrain, easing the impact on knees, hips, ankles, and connective tissue, allowing you to recover from strains and small injuries while maintaining your strength and cardiovascular endurance.

   Few of us would abandon the open road, or even an indoor track, for an immobile contraption. But notice how runners who've never used the technology unhesitatingly dismiss it. Notice your own resistance to any change in your workouts, any innovation that holds tentative promise for improvement. You arrive at your training program through months or years of fitful elimination and peculiar faith. And through experience: sweat and miles have taught you what's useful, what's sustainable and gratifying, what yields results. You’ve earned the right to love your workouts.

   Danger lies in loving them too much. A training program should change with your body - as performance improves and as age advances. Likewise, it should adapt to the seasons, to successive goals, to moods, and to the changing demands of daily living. Accommodation is the high natural order for running. Can your workouts also accommodate the unknown?

   You'd be right to argue that skepticism is a runner's bitter best friend. No one regrets a dollar squandered on a new sports gel or some other reengineered form of sugar, but watch your temper blow when $150 running shoes allow your feet to pronate like a drunk chicken's. Fad workouts can lay you up for weeks with injury. Far too many personal trainers are charismatic know-nothings. Even the treadmill has its drawbacks. Most runners work at a faster pace and a shorter stride on a treadmill than they would on terra firma, increasing the likelihood of injury to their Achilles tendons. And while many treadmills allow you to increase the incline of your workouts, you don't get the subsequent descent that a proper hill delivers. Muscles develop unevenly.

   Still, there's no denying the machine's usefulness to runners. Experimentation in all aspects of your training is both necessary and gratifying. It helps you out of ruts, solves problems, and hoists you to new levels of performance. Running begs for the force of your imagination as well as your determined efforts. Anything less is vanity.