As I’ve mentioned before my wife and I bought a treadmill early last December.  So far I love it.  Without it I would never have been able to keep any sort of training regimen with the shortening daylight hours and lowering temperatures through the winter.  We made our purchase at the local Dick’s Sporting Goods.  I know one of the managers there from church, and he let me use his friend’s and family discount when the sale rolled around.  That saved us about 20% and allowed us to get a much better machine than I thought we could (read: spend more than I thought my wife would let me.  Thanks, Honey).  Of course in purchasing said treadmill we used that card that a lot of these big chain stores have.  Best Buy has one too.  You know, where if you purchase $5000 dollars of stuff in a year they’ll send you a certificate for $5.  I’m exaggerating but not by much.  I did the math on the Best Buy one once and it works out to a 2% rebate.  I’m not sure what the percentage is on the Dick’s version, but it’s pretty close.  Still, a treadmill added up to a lot of points and sure enough in late January we got a certificate worth $40.  That’s when the trouble started.

Truth be told $40 is $40, even if you have to spend it by the end of February to prevent if from not being $40 anymore.  So what do you do with $40?  Shoes of course.  A runner always needs shoes.  Brooks Trance?  Sure, but Dick’s charges more for them than everyone else.  Asics DS Trainer 14?  Nope, but they’ve got the 13.  In the store?  No, online.  Hmm.  Asics Hyper Speed?  I need racing flats.  No.  Brooks racing flats?  No.  Any racing flats?  Not really.  Shorts!  A runner always needs shorts.  I’m the old school type that likes the ones where the front panel overlaps the back panel.  Nike makes them.  Dicks caries Nike, right?  Well they do and they don’t.  You see where I’m going with this. 

I can’t expect Dick’s to be John’s Run Walk Shop, or Omega Sports, or Phidippides or any of the other places that end up being running’s equivalent of Cheers.  And to be honest, I don’t want them to.  Big box stores are about getting a good price on a treadmill and some orange cones to mark an Ultimate field.  When I need the next larger sized ball and cleats for the start of kids’ soccer season, I go to the big box.  But when I want to feel the difference in fit between an Asics Hyper Speed and a Brooks T6 Racer I’ll head to John’s.  And while I’m there I’ll probably linger and talk about running with people who love to run.

Long live the specialty running shop.

I like Craig’s List.  It facilitates a face-to-face, cash exchange that is inherently scam-free for free.  This is as opposed to EBay which has become a wasteland.  I’ve got a Craig’s List listing now for an Archos 605 that I’m trying to sell.  I previously sold a PSP and a Garmin Forerunner 50 (which is a great, no-frills heart rate monitor by the way).  Not too long after I  posted my PSP last year I got an email from someone who was going to pay more than the asking price and just needed my PayPal ID.  All I had to do was box it up an ship it off.  Of course it was a scam.  I got another one yesterday regarding the Archos from anitamorgan82@gmail.com. 

The text was in light gray and looked like an auto-generated signature line.  Still, I wrote back and said that I did.  Within seconds I got a reply.  Actually, I got two replies.  The first was from the original address with the same content as the first email.  The second was from Anita’s other email - anitamorgan85@yahoo.com.

Hey, $350 plus $180 when I’m only asking $225 is not bad.  Spelling and grammar aside, Anita must be a real sweetheart.  At this point I’m curious just how this scam works.  I do a little searching and find this poor guy’s experience.  Being a computer guy, I’m also wondering if Anita, sweetheart though she may be, is a human or an auto-responder.  I write back before going to bed.

This morning I learned that Anita is a human because I found two responses from the previous night.

That one arrived just eight minutes after I sent my $1093.37 fee list (including the anti-dolphin coating charge).  Anita is willing.  And not just willing, but eager (probably due to the long delivery time) as evidence by her second email which arrived less than an hour later.

By this morning my curiosity had run its course.  I had my fun, and as Anita might say, it was a “hamless deal”.  The sad thing is that there are people out there who are in for plenty of ham.  They’re well intentioned or naive or inexperienced or lured into getting more than their asking price.  Whatever they are, ultimately, Anita is going to take their money and waste their time.  So watch out, folks, because I’m here to tell you that Anita is a non-sweetheart human eager to do you ham harm.  And she’s probably not the only one.

When I started running again last fall I picked up The Competitive Runner's Handbook by by Bob and Shelly-Lynn Florence Glover.  During my high school and college days I had the luxury of a coach to guide my training.  From that experience I have a reasonable understanding about how to train for distances from 5K to 10K.  My new goal race distance is the half-marathon and marathon for 2009.  While there are obvious similarities in training for a 5K and a marathon you can’t just take a 5K plan and multiply by nine.  The Competitive Runner's Handbook helped me begin to get a feel for the training regimen changes necessary to race at the marathon distance.  It even has suggested training schedules for runners of various ability levels.  Still, I wasn’t finding the information I was looking for.  There are a thousand and one half-marathon or marathon training schedules out there.  But where do they come from?  How are they created?  It wasn’t long before I realized that what I was really looking for was not a mini-encyclopedia of running but a book that would teach me how to be a coach so that I could coach myself. 

When I went looking for that kind of book I found Brad Hudson’s Run Faster from the 5K to the Marathon: How to Be Your Own Best Coach.  In this book Hudson and his co-author Matt Fitzgerald lay out Hudson’s adaptive coaching philosophy.  In a nutshell Hudson approaches coaching each athlete as an individual with different strengths and weaknesses and seeks to tailor a plan that best suits their race goals.  The book is narrowly focused.  You won’t find chapters on nutrition, stretching, or race strategy.  While there are training schedules laid out in the back of the book, they are intended to be guidelines around which to build your own schedule.  So far I’m in week 7 of the half-marathon level 3 schedule.  I started at week one on January 4.  My plan is to stick as close to his 16 week schedule as possible leading up to the Country Music Half-Marathon.  From there I’ll should have plenty of information both from training and the race to assess where to go next in my training.  And that is what Hudson’s approach is all about – train, assess, refine, repeat.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the treadmill this winter.  While I’m looking forward to getting back outside (possibly next week judging by the long term forecast), I’ve been very grateful for my new treadmill.  I’ve also been grateful for my laptop that I use to watch movies and TV (Netflix, Hulu, DVD) while logging miles.  I’ve never listened to music while running outside.  I have considered it a few times, but have avoided bringing along a music player in part because I didn’t want it to take away from my essential experience of running.  Some people feel just the opposite, and that’s fine by me - whatever works to get you out the door.  When it comes to the treadmill, however, I never thought twice about music or video.  Here are a few of the movies or shows that I’ve watched so far:

• Transformers – High energy action with decent amount of foot chases.
• Eagle Eye – Another action flick featuring Shia LaBeouf with foot and car chases.
• Traitor – A movie about a terrorist plot staring Don Cheadle.
• Spirit of the Marathon – A documentary about marathons in general and the 2005 Chicago Marathon specifically.  It’s a must see for runners. 
• Breaking Away – I hadn’t seen this on in a while.  A goofy old feel good movie about a guy trying to make it as a pro cyclist. 
• Legend of the Seeker – This is a new fantasy genre show I found on Hulu. 
• Eureka – Another TV show from Hulu.

The TV shows have been good for shorter runs.  Sometimes I delay starting them for a mile or two if I’m doing a longer run.  Likewise the movies can be split across a long and a short run.  I’ve also thought about getting some audio books from the library if the movies run dry – no pun intended.

What do you watch or listen to when you’re running?