Today I Altered Gravity...

Okay, today was my fourth session on the Alter-G... and I felt like it was time to mess around a little.

After all.... it's an ANTI-GRAVITY TREADMILL.

Had a slight hiccup while starting up -- I was standing there, arm extended, pressing "select" on a remote control and wondering why it wasn't working. I was all zipped in and the machine was calibrating... but all of a sudden it stopped and flashed "CE2".

Oh poop.  I pressed "stop", hoping it would clear the error. Nope.

I was just imagining trying to call for help, when I decided to just press "start" again. This time, I followed the instructions. Because, apparently, when it says "stand still with your arms crossed", it means you need to stand still with your arms crossed.

So, fully calibrated, I started my warm-up walk. After 5 brisk minutes I cranked it up to a 10-minute mile to warm up my legs, and set the machine at 80%. Five minutes later, feeling warm, I sped up at 0.2 mile increments every minute. When I got to 8-minute miles, I decided to decrease the percentage of weight I was running at....

First I decreased to 70 percent -- springy. I sped up.

Then I tried 67% -- hey, that's running at 2/3rds of my weight. I sped up again.

Then 60%. Wow. More speed.

Then 50%. That's silly. Just silly. More speed!

Then 40%. I was having a hard time touching the tread, but my legs were flying. At this point I was running a 6-minute mile. Which I do not run in the real world. Perhaps on the moon.

I slowed down to 7:30 pace while cranking the weight back up.... For the last couple of minutes I ran at 100% -- while panicking slightly that I wouldn't be able to keep up. I very, very quickly reduced the pace down after I hit the 30-minute mark. Phew.

Not sure I'll play with the support much more -- it was really nuts.