Back on the treadmill

It’s the start of a new month and a new fiscal year and time to get back onto the treadmill.

It’s been gathering dust in the garage ever since the late January ice storm and 10-day power outage wrecked our exercise routine.

I’ve been eyeing it for months, feeling an increasingly guilty need to get back on the Mobius Road. But it won’t fit through any of our doors without disassembly, so it must remain in the un-air conditioned garage. Using it during the last couple of weeks when the heat index was 100 or more would have been suicidal.

But the temperature was 72 this morning and I was flat out of excuses.

So I strapped on my Suunto Advizor and its heart monitor, clipped my blue iPod Shuffle to my belt and knocked out a 20-minute mile. Back in Thorntown, Ind., I had a mile-long course laid out that I now visualize as I walk on the treadmill.

The first quarter-mile takes me north on Pearl Street to Main Street where I turn left at the gas station and stride west past Railer’s IGA, the barber shop that specializes in mullets and being closed, the police station and town hall, and on down to West Street and the Presbyterian Church. I turn left again and head south past a couple of fenced yards with barking dogs and over irregular sidewalks, heaved out of alignment by decades of tree root growth, down to the little metal fabrication factory where Austin worked for awhile, then left again on Mills Street past the elementary school and the park and back to our driveway.

I did it today with only a 1% incline, but that will change over the next week or so as I regain some stamina that was stolen by five months of being a couch potato.