The cost of running indoors

Yesterday morning I dropped by a gym near where we were to have a look. The gym had offered a free day pass allowing people to drop in to use its facilities before possibly signing up for memberships. Now, those of you who have read this blog often enough will know I hate spending money unnecessarily on equipment, so you'll know I wouldn't have even considered getting a membership. But it was that free day pass that enticed me. I thought that I'd go in to have a look at the facilities and the treadmills first, see what they had, and maybe return a few weeks later, flashing the day pass to get a free workout on the treadmills. In the back of my mind was the thought of running a sub 1:40 half-marathon on the treadmill, setting it to go at 8 miles per hour and using it to pace me.

The guy who showed me around calmly explained that it costs £165 (US$300, I think)to join, then either £42.50 ($80) per month for a three-month membership, or £39.95 ($work it out yourself) per month for a twelve-month membership. He also said that since I'd already come on that day, I couldn't really return on another day to use the facilities; the reasoning was that the day pass was only valid for the day I came, even if it were just to check out the gym.

The next time I'm ever bored with the stepper, and the weather's seemingly too rubbish to run outside, I think the thought of how much it would cost to run indoors should be sufficient to boot me out the door.

Stepping yesterday: 20 minutes, then some bicep curls and pressups. There is a noticeable area of "soft ground" between the upper and lower half of my body, so I might have to do crunches again, much as I hate them because I end up with neckache after doing them.

As an afterthought - does running a half-marathon distance on a treadmill count? I know this is a rather anal question, but I - in my own anally retentive way - worked out that if a treadmill manufacturer over-estimated the length of the running platform by just an inch, at my pace I would lose more than 30 feet for every mile supposedly run on the treadmill. That works out to be about nearly 400 feet for a half-marathon, a distance that might work out to be worth about 30 seconds to me. Also, a half-marathon indoors on a treadmill is run in fairly comfortable conditions. So, treadmill half-marathon - does it count, or not?