As it turns out, I am continuing my running regiment after my “touch down run” on Sunday, while I am still at Cupertino for my 4.5 days of meeting. Given that the dawn breaks around 7am and I need to leave for office by 8am, I decide to go for indoor treadmill running instead. The 5-6 degrees Celsius weather will be too chilly for me at 6am too, at least not with the kind of running gear I have.

Treadmill could detect my Polar Heartbeat monitoring device

My biological clock wakes me up at 4.30am on Tuesday (7th Feb), after a good 6 hours of sleep.  Yes, I seem to relish the opportunity of being able to sleep and wake up early whenever I am in US. After a quick wash up, I head over to the hotel’s gym. My first treadmill run ends with just a struggling 4.02km as I have a hard time trying to adjust the treadmill’s speed, since I am too used to tracking my pace (rather than speed) and in km  (rather than miles). Struggling as it was, however, I manage to keep my heart rate level below 150 for the first time, averaging at 140.

And it is as though I have addicted to running,  I continue to run daily for the remaining week. By now I am familiar with my pace and speed in imperial units, I carry out my interval training with some deliberate control over my pace. The good thing about treadmill running is that you consciously know and keep to the desire pace. So you cannot afford to slack unless you cheat. On the third treadmill running, I follow a gradual but aggressive pace over the 3 legs  interval training (8 minutes of run with 2 mins of walk or slow jog).  The run ends with the longest distance covered at the fastest pace I have ever achieved — 4.64km at 6.28 min/km.

For my fifth (and last) running supposedly on Friday while in Cupertino, I feel I may not have enough time since I will have to pack my luggage in the morning for the hotel check-out. So following my run on the Thursday morning (8th Feb), I decide to complete the fifth run on the same day evening. At 11pm, I am back in the gym again. Thinking of doing something different instead of the usual 30 minute interval training, I proceed with a 40 minutes long endurance run. Since it is not an interval training, I have to find a pace that I am comfortable to last the entire 40 minutes. So I start with a slow pace at around 7.5 min/km. By the halfway mark, I increase the pace to 7 min/km since I think I still have more than half the energy to continue for another 20 minutes. Eventually, I manage to complete the 40 minutes run, finishing a distance of 5.36km. It is not a pace that I can brag about (average of 7.27 min/km), but certainly to complete a 5.36km run, at a decent heartbeat rate of 145, is something I have never imagined 2 months ago.

So another milestone — the 5km milestone, completed. In total, 39 running activities completed, 145.03km covered.