Equipment Training

So I do the exact opposite as you. In the winter months I'll train on a treadmill and on a mag trainer indoors. But I think its the same idea.

I can only offer the "blue collar" response that was given to me by my coach but it's food for thought.

The indoor treadmill is good training. You can still get your cardio out of it. But...its not the same as running. The treadmill moves your foot for you, and because your not getting all those imperfections on roads/sidewalks/trails some of the smaller muscles are not being worked and you will be more prone to injury when you do hit the outside. Try and get out as much as possible. Even once a week is better than nothing. You won't get the same results as running..but ...its a pretty darn near close second. Its less about the treadmill you use..and more about the effort your going to put in. make sure your cadence increases and you hit those key HR markers. Also...try and keep the incline at 1 or 2%. It helps mitigate the treadmill effect.

As for indoor cycling. Consider getting a mag trainer, roller or something else in lieu of a stationary bike. Again...training outside where you will get the full effect of working more of the core, battling wind, etc. is the best..but nothing wrong with indoor cycling. But those stationary bikes are not as good as getting your actual bike on a mag trainer and using that. I'm sure others have great setups through Zwift...and I happily defer to more learned triathletes.

Your on the right path braugh. Like the rest of us, you can only do what you can do with what you have. That treadmill run isn't the perfect replacement for an actual run, but you reap benefit from it, and its a suitable replacement. Get out when you can. Same with the cycling. But my two cents...stay away from the stationary bikes. (They are better than nothing..but using an actual bike on a mag trainer, roller, etc. way better)

Just a little bit of confidence booster...there was an athlete about a decade ago from the Yukon Territories who "just" missed Canada's national team....and trained almost exclusively indoors on a treadmill due to weather and outside conditions.

Wow thanks for the input, I really appreciate all of that. It gets really hot here in the summertime and I can't always make it outside to run or bike. If it's the middle of the day it just drains me to run outside in the 105-115 F heat. I haven't heard much about this but is there a benefit to running outside in the heat or would that just be overkill?

As for a mag bike, I like that idea a lot better and it seems that it will be a lot lighter on my budget too, and then I will get to train on my bike that will be used for races. Thanks for that advice and motivation! I really appreciate that.

During the summer I'll have to see if I can get a good mix of training indoors and outdoors. I usually won't go to the pool until late in the evening when the sun has started to set so it's not so hot outside.

All in all, maybe I just need to suck it up?

So I ended up getting the treadmill. I'm still looking for rollers for my bike but that is a work in progress.

The treadmill was actually cheaper than listed because I found a sweet coupon here: http://www.nordictrackcoupon.com/

I am excited to have more accessibility to training at all times of the day, I just hope I can get as good of workouts on the treadmill as I do when I am running outside. I'm going to see how I like training on the treadmill the next couple of weeks compared to when I run outside. Hopefully, it will be worth the spend. If I need to go back to solely running outside then I will and I'll be able to just use the treadmill for light runs, or my wife will be able to use it. I guess we will see how the next few weeks goes for me!

How is it going?

It's going okay. I've had a few setbacks and I haven't been able to workout/train as much as I would like to. I still haven't found any new rollers for my bike but I am working on that. Summer just kind of got away from me and now school will be starting again here soon and things just get busy. I'm sure you understand how that goes!

I tried a 'power' treadmill workout yesterday just to get some movement since I haven't been able to exercise much the past few weeks and it went well, hoping to start training again soon!

Organizing my schedule is one of the hardest parts of training. I find that if I keep plugging away and it starts to click.