What Are They Thinking?

Here in New Jersey, today was probably the nicest day of the year thus far. Morning temps were in the mid-40's with highs anticipated to be around 68. My gym has about 20 treadmills, and at about 9:00AM, about 90% were in use. It seems like a good thing, but my reaction was "What's wrong with these people?" To me, running or walking indoors buys you an overly warm climate without much air circulation on a machine that lacks the variability to challenge your legs to do the work of feeding back to your brain the differences in the surface you land on, or in other words, "Are these people stupid?" I can understand why they won't run outside when it's 10 degrees or raining, but on a perfect day, I'm lost by their thinking (or lack thereof), of course, they probably waited five minutes for a parking space in the gym lot so they would have to walk any further than necessary.

While we're ranting about stupid, I got a real kick out of a blog post yesterday. My suggestion is that you take a few moments to read this article, then read this post by curmudgeonly sub-elite marathoner Duncan Larkin.

Another good rant was put out by Dirt Runner, who had a pretty good riff going about barefoot running. Some of us gave him a bit of education, and he posted this follow-up. I'm interested to see if he makes further comment on this.