Today is Saturday, but I did this walk yesterday. I know that on Thursday when I wrote about doing The Arches National Park, Utah, I said that I was going to rest on Friday since I had done seven days in a row of 2 mile walks. I changed my mind because I had the brilliant idea that maybe my feet are going numb due to the position of my hands/arms on the bars so I decided to Google using hiking poles on a treadmill. It seems crazy and dangerous, but I figured someone has probably done it so I wanted to see how that went before trying it myself. I was able to find a couple videos on YouTube with people doing it so I decided to go out and search for the little rubber boots that go on the tips of our hiking poles. I could not find them, so I opened up the new package of poles that hubby got last year or the year before at Costco and then we never used them. They came with two sets of rubber covers. One set looks like a boot and the other looks like the bottom of a crutch. It's just a little rubber stopper with a flat bottom.
I made sure to use the hand straps so I didn't drop the poles on the treadmill and kill myself. This was actually not the first walk I tried to use the poles. I started with one that had a lot of downhill at the beginning and the machine does not like it when I do too much downhill. It just stops. I should have known it was going to happen because I could feel the tread slipping forward, but I kept going. The machine died 10 minutes in. I was pretty bummed. I shut it down and then pouted in the other room. After about half an hour, I decided to give it another try with this one since it was pretty level.
It was very awkward to try to hit the tread with the poles and I couldn't really get a good rhythm going. I was about to just give up on the whole thing, but then I had an epiphany. I set the rubber stoppers on the rails and just let them stationary. The goal with this was to get my hands and arms in a more natural position, but have the poles for balance since I don't do well without holding on since I feel like I'm going to fall off the machine. This method actually worked pretty well. I was able to swing my arms to some extent like I would normally do while walking. It was a bit annoying though that the poles kept moving slightly so they would randomly just fall off the side of the treadmill and throw me off balance. I felt like I had better posture this way, but it definitely made my body work more since the upper body was moving more than it normally would if I was just holding onto the treadmill bars. I wasn't going very fast and it was relatively flat, but I still felt rather worn out by the whole experience. My feet also still went numb around the 22 minute mark. I decided to keep with the poles even though my feet were asleep just to keep up the experiment. However, around the 35 minute mark, I was just too tired to keep up with the poles, so I tossed them aside and just held onto the machine. Then I sped up the machine a bit to get off.
This was an interesting experiment, but I'm not so sure I'm excited to try it again. The whole point was to see if I could find a way to be on the treadmill without my feet going numb. This was not the solution. The next experiment is to try it with different shoes.
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| My Walk |
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| What it shows it will be |
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