Overtraining: The March To Pizza

The slow, steady march of stars and check-marks down the date boxes on my wall calendar gives me a sense of joy and accomplishment.  I have nearly made it to the end of August and the first really comfortable days of outdoor running, in September, will not be far behind.  It also means Suzanne will pull out the slow cooker; stew and soup season will begin soon.  The first days and weeks of warm bowls of stew or soup, with either cheese bread or a sandwich, are a welcome reward for those hard run workouts.  But, once Thanksgiving arrives, I will be jonesing for pizza.

We used to do pizza every Friday evening with my old coach and his wife.  We did the same pizza joint for two years straight.  Now I only go there if we’re in the neighborhood and we don’t want to drive closer to home.  Price might have been one thing, but familiarity breeds tolerance. 

Or contempt. 

Pizza often reminds me of many topics having to do with life, the universe around us…and running.  I remember a lunch discussion with an old running friend of mine, Drake.  He, his wife, Suzanne, and I sat down over pizza one Saturday after a local road race.  Drake said he was disappointed with his race performance and asked what I would recommend for his training plan.  I asked him what he was already doing in training.  He told me he ran the same 5K circuit near his home, every day.   At all-out race pace.  I took a deep breath, prefaced my suggestions with “if I were your coach,” and told him what I felt to be true.  He thanked me for my insights, but he never really took the advice to heart.  He no longer runs races, in fact, he’s what John Parker, Jr. might call ‘once a runner.’ 

I still see him every Sunday morning when we go out for our “sort-of-long run.”  He rides a bike.  Full blast.

Monotony and unchanging routine can be a comfort to many persons.  But the athlete who does the same run or workout day in and day out is most likely going to understand Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity.  There’s little chance for a different outcome or improvement in performance if an athlete is doing the same thing without variation for too long a period of time.  When laying a training foundation there are periods where efforts appear “boring,” but the body is most likely adapting to the stress.  But not varying the intensity of workout over the course of the training cycle or the year, especially if the intensity is high, is a certain way to eventually suffer physically and mentally from overtraining…and if not remedied, to suffer emotionally from burnout.

An over-trained (or under-recovered) athlete can show a constellation of symptoms which can be emotional, mental, or physiological in nature:

Runners who have a feeling as if their legs are heavy or wooden, or have muscles which are more sore than usual, or a sudden increase in thirst, especially at night, are most likely in an under-recovered state. 

When it comes to change in heart rate, researchers have equated an overtraining state to a sudden increase in early morning heart rate.  However, a decreased heart rate during exercise bouts is also a message to the athlete that the body is not completely recovered from a period of training.

It may seem beyond obvious that the treatment for overtraining is rest.  The body needs time to recover.  After the recovery period, which can be as short as one week and take as long as six weeks (sometimes much longer in the most chronic cases).  The intensity of the workouts after the recovery needs to stay at a reduced level, and the athlete should look more closely at their training periods.  Other treatments to combat overtraining include adjusting the diet to take in more calories or more nutrients, even adjusting the way they sleep.

There are programs, such as Matt Dixon’s Purplepatch Fitness, which utilize computer algorithms and spreadsheets to quantify training, recovery, nutrition and functional strength.  Finnish heart rate monitor manufacturer Suunto uses a calculation of post-exercise oxygen consumption (calculated from changes in individual heartbeats) to determine how hard an athlete has trained, as well as how hard their next workout should be to eventually increase fitness.  But any device or spreadsheet is of no use if the athlete does not have the courage (especially in a culture where a blank space on the calendar is seen as a personality flaw) to choose to rest.

An athlete can ignore their body for only so long.  The body will eventually make the athlete listen for a period much longer than the initially-requested chat.

Irrational Thoughts?

'Sometimes I think it's a shame when I get feelin' better when I'm feelin' no pain.' - "Sundown," Gordon Lightfoot (1974)

Just because a person has coached athletes for a few years, has learned from hard experience what not to do, and struggles on a regular basis to clearly communicate those lessons to people who ask questions of them does not necessarily mean they have achieved an immunity to the disorder I like to call "abject stupidity."

Somehow I managed to survive a brief exposure to this disorder on my way to my "real" job this morning.

I started to think about training for a marathon.

Those who follow my rambling, sometimes cryptic missives know marathon training nearly turned me into "once a runner" approximately six months ago. It wasn't necessarily marathon training which was the primary cause of my achilles injury as much as a failure to deal with an under-healed achilles tendonitis issue which plagued me for three or four years.

I'm not certain what made me start to think about the marathon. Could it be because the evenings and the early morning hours have become a little more cool? Perhaps the slow approach of autumn and the need to review the training plan of one of my athletes was a subtle hint. Maybe, just maybe, it was that set of 400s we ran during last night's workout.

I wasn't the one spanking the group, though. Jim took Deena and myself to the woodshed most of the workout. He was kind enough to let us out after the third set. But it was nice to float up along Jim's shoulder on the back stretch of the last 400 and be in that middle ground between floating - where you feel the spring in the toe-off - and the feel when you know there's no "extra gear" available.

So a little bit of the speed is returning; 15 seconds a mile here, 20 seconds a mile there. But I must remind myself, like Taco Bell differs from Mexican food, there is a vast difference between being "healthy" and being "fit;" being "able to run" and being "able to race." I am most certainly not out of the woods yet. But I am beginning to see glimpses of the glade.

Injured runners often take too little time off from training, don't allow the body enough time to gradually ramp back up to the level of training they were at when they injured themselves, and don't stay in touch with how their body is feeling during the ramp-up. Fail to exercise caution and restraint when increasing distance, duration, intensity, and especially when races are added, and those "small" injuries which are usually remedied with a weeks' worth of rest or cross-training can transform into "major" issues which drastically affect the overall quality of life.

Feeling no pain is not necessarily the same as feeling better. It is, however, the first step on the road to recovery.

As for this ol' coach, we're almost ready for 5,000-meter road races, and not much more. In the meantime, there's a couple of flat late-autumn and early-spring marathons I'll continue to consider; the operating word is "consider."

I'm not that stupid. Yet.

Beware of Human: Winter Training Tips For Drivers and Driven (Runners)

I enjoy the autumn - comfortable temperatures, dry air, pumpkin & spice everything - but I also have to be on my best behavior as a motor vehicle operator & as a runner on the roads. My wife often points out pedestrians for me; the ones crossing in the center of the roadway, half a block from a lighted crosswalk, by calling out "human being, human being..." Nine-to-ten times out of ten I notice them before she does, & cannot help but marvel at the abject foolishness of a human pedestrian, jaywalking in darkness, doing their finest "stealth bomber" imitation. What is it about wearing black or subdued gray that makes otherwise seemingly sensible pedestrians want to do something stupid, like not use a signal-lit crosswalk at night?

These thoughts crossed my mind again yesterday evening after a truncated tempo run on Pensacola Beach. If not for the overcast conditions we probably had fifteen minutes of daylight; it was definitely past twilight once I began to walk a 600-meter cool-down back to my car. A running friend, Walt, chatted about the quickly-darkening conditions as I changed into a long-sleeved t-shirt. We both considered ourselves lucky; traffic on the beach was light because of the weather conditions & darkness. We knew it was high time to adapt some of our favorite mid-week running. "I guess it doesn't matter whether you're in the right as a runner," said Walt. "Even if you are, the car always wins on account of sheer weight."

My wife and I have been in a twilight automobile collision, on the way to a track workout, which injured both of us; her more so. The accident taught me a hard lesson about defensive driving. Why is night driving so dangerous? Insurance companies & motor vehicle bureau statistics say one obvious answer is darkness. We have a harder time judging distance, color, & objects in our periphery, add to this our need to adapt to growing darkness during twilight hours (maybe even the stress of work & a rush to get home)...danger, danger, Will Robinson. Honestly, I can tell you my vision isn't what I'd like it to be...disorders like macular degeneration, which come as a result of aging, can wreak havoc on night vision. If you're over forty it's probably affected you, too.

As a result of that one accident, I've adapted many of my driving routes from work to home, from home to workouts, & even the routes on which I train. Ample street lighting is almost a mandatory item for me if I'm in an area where motor vehicle traffic can be accessed. I also try to avoid routes where darkened side streets, blind corners, parking lots which are situated lower than the running or training surface can cross my path. My mid-week run is on a barrier island with relatively few cross streets, so I don't have to adapt much there.

Sometimes, though, your workout may need to be moved to a time where there is ample daylight. If you can't move the workout, and it's dark, be certain to run either on a path or on the edge of the roadway which faces approaching traffic.

Autumn runners (or cyclists, for that matter) should take advantage of clothing items which have large reflective patches, stripes, spots - or are completely reflective on their own accord. Some clothing manufacturers have materials which are neon bright & cannot be missed...unless the driver of the motor vehicle wants to miss it. Also think about flashing clip-on lights, headlamps, & small flashlights. If you don't want to wear reflectorized or lighted items, light-colored clothes are a nearly-acceptable alternative...but I like something which sends light back in the general direction of the driver. Some people may disagree with me on this, but I used to wear yellow or amber-tinted glasses during darker conditions - it helped not only to keep down some of the glare of high beams (we'll talk more about that) but also to keep wind & grit out of the eyes. It's difficult to see in the dark when your eyes are closed half of the time.

While you're thinking about how to be seen as a runner, you might want to consider enhancing your ability to see as a driver on the road. Clean headlights, tail lights, signal lights & windows at least once a week, and replace them as soon as you learn one is out (Is that a motorcycle or a large truck? You can only answer that one wrong once.). Make certain your windshield wipers & any rear wipers are in good condition. I would even recommend using window defogging/rain repellant products, such as Rain-X. Turn your headlights on at dusk to help other drivers see you. Don't drive with the high-beams on unless you are in a very dark area & you're driving at high speed. And please, don't flash those high-beams at an approaching runner.

I've often complained, ranted, railed & beat the drum about the dangers of running with headphones, especially at races. I do wear headphones - when running solo, in broad daylight, out of the general path of automobile drivers. When I do, I keep my volume down & my head on a swivel for approaching bicycles, pedestrians & hazards. A large dog once joined me on a run while I was wearing headphones. I had no clue until I looked off to my right and saw him. Big dog. Very big dog. Thank heavens he was "friendly," taught me a lesson. So, if you have to have music while running, keep the volume as low as possible. If I can hear your music 12 feet away from your head, the volume is probably too loud. But that's another rant altogether.

For drivers, it's painfully obvious that to drink & drive borders on insanity. However, drinking & driving is a leading cause of accidents – including night driving accidents. The next big culprit to add to the list of hindrances & distractions which can cause an accident would be cell phones. Military bases have forbidden the use of cell phones without hands-free operation, so I learned early on to check messages or make calls while sitting in the parking lot. I can almost justify a brief "I'm at this location & on my way" phone call while driving, but I've seen animated ten-minute-plus conversations going on in the heart of town, while driving thirty miles per hour. Scared me to death. I shouldn't even have to complain about how dangerous text messaging, e-mailing & web surfing is on some of the newer smart phones. It's not smart phones which cause accidents, just dumb drivers.

So, as the leaves turn brown & the sky becomes gray, begin to think about your fellow man, whether they are a pedestrian, a runner, or a motor vehicle operator. It's all karmic - doing right by your fellow road user can lead to safe & sane road use for everyone.

Post-Bushwacker...Keeping It Real

It's the middle of a Monday morning & I'm sitting at my home office desk. A temporary situation, due to the fact my loving wife is going on the road again - please, no Willie Nelson music. Thank you. I'll drop her at the airport, then go in to my real office & commence to do my real work.

This last weekend was the running event which (kind of) kicks off the autumn racing season for a lot of local runners; a point-to-point 5K from Gulf Breeze to Pensacola Beach. Most of the folks who participate in the event do so because they know the post-race event is really good. Hey, when you can get over a thousand people (not counting bandits) to run in (EDITORIAL COMMENT: Hyperbole follows) a billion degree heat & near-maximum humidity conditions, you know it isn't for the medals or the race shirt. It really has to do with the post-race party. In my humble opinion, the Capt'n Fun group does the post-race as well as any other large club in the country.

But, talking to my friend Aaron...or at least with Betsy, his wife...the next day, one thing we don't do real well (the same goes for a lot of local events) is racewalking. Aaron racewalks because he's had one of his hips replaced; no running for him, to say the least. It doesn't mean he's slow, though...he's a ten-minute per mile (perhaps faster than that!) kind of guy. The only way you're going to beat him in a racewalk is either work at it - or cheat by running.

How can you tell when a racewalker is running? Simple enough...if you take the time to look closely. I've seen racewalkers with both feet off the ground before - definitely cheating.

Here's the problem. USA Track and Field controls racewalking. They train judges/officials in the technique & lay down the rules. Road Runners Club of America supports recreational runners, as well as walkers who do so because they are unable to run. RRCA clubs & many events - at least the ones here - get themselves in a real kettle of fish because they decide to set up a 'racewalking' division and provide awards for those people who consider 3.1 miles too far (There are some days when I consider 3.106856 miles too far.) to run.

So what do you do, Mr. or Ms. Race Director? If you have an event that's big enough to attract real racewalkers from out of the area...the ones who have seen USATF officials & participated in real racewalking events where improper technique is disqualified, do you tell these folks to suck it up and drive on? Do you make the effort to get USATF judges to officiate your racewalk division, or perhaps restructure & rename it a fitness walker division?
(I would love to use an inflammatory, pejorative term here, but I worry about the ability of my hips, knees, & other joints to carry me at my speeds for the rest of my mortal existence! Hubris tends to bite me squarely in the backside.)

It's kind of a shame to hear we do wrong by a number of people in the community...especially the ones who decide to travel three hours one way, spend a week of holiday time, beaucoups of dough, etc., etc., etc. There are people within the local community who know enough about the sport to judge an event or two, perhaps even enough to teach proper technique.

If we're going to do it, let's keep it real. If not, tap the kegs before the start & have a fun run.

One Excuse...

"...is as good as another on any given day." - Coach Fox, multiple times between 2002-05

Every once in a while I have athletes who decide to engage in 'summer,' a strange season of the earthly year, a time filled with many outdoor entertainment activities, including a very strange concept called vacation. During this vacation, the athlete gets into an automobile & drives for several hours to a place where they spend the majority of the money they saved over the previous year on lodging, food & the exact same outdoor entertainment opportunities which they could have enjoyed at home had they decided to stay.

Also, during this vacation, the athlete usually makes a conscious decision to do NOTHING. As a result, they return back to the track on a Tuesday evening after one of these vacations having lost every bit of the hard-won fitness we attempted to develop from their previous vacation, during the period between the autumnal equinox & two weeks after the winter solstice. Following that vacation, they stepped on their bathroom scale & realized they weighed much more than they suspected...as if their jeans couldn't have told them the same message some time in late November.
How these athletes became conditioned to believe a vacation was meant to exclude exercise is beyond my understanding. If you were to ask every single one of them what they used to do throughout their summer vacation as a child, I would wager nine of every ten would tell you they were involved in some sort of unstructured physical activity, like swimming, bicycling, walking, hiking, climbing, & all that good stuff...on a daily basis.

So, how did we go from doing stuff on vacation to not doing a thing on vacation? Mind you, one or two of my athletes actually perform physical labor during the week, so for them, physical exercise is probably more fun than chore. A vacation for them would probably not be harmful. However, the rest of you (myself included) are still on the hook. If you're going to go on one of those vacation things, there's a very good reason for the "take half the clothes and twice the money" advice provided by every travel consultant...it's so you can add at least one pair of running shoes & three outfits, silly. Your employer will thank you. Your co-workers will thank you. And yes, your coach will definitely thank you...not nearly as much as you will, though.

During this time of the year, it's difficult to get fired up about food. Well, unless it's fired up on a grill & sitting beside a cold beverage of choice. Otherwise, most indoor dining is boring. Hardest part about being a person in training at this time of the year is this: You need to get nourishment back into your body, at the least some nourishment within 30 minutes of finishing a workout, but other times during the day, too.

But when the day is divided up into workout, clean-up, commute, work, commute, workout, clean-up, sleep (with a few other small pieces in between), it's a challenge to get the right food in the right amounts into you...especially if you're one of those people who hate eating first thing in the morning, or don't have a stable enough work schedule during the day, or don't have access to a kitchen/refrigerator, or have knucklehead co-workers who raid the fridge. The key is to get what your body needs. Keep it simple.My wife recommended I take a big ol' salad into the office so I could scarf on throughout the day. Nice, but there are days when I'm not exactly sitting in front of my desk doing office things. I could have something a little smaller every so often, though. She made a salad the other morning, which was sitting on the stove next to a couple of bagel halves. I couldn't tell at first what the contents were, so I opened up the lid. Instantly I smelled onions & knew there was no way I could take that in to work.

I don't eat (raw) onions, period. End of story. I can tell if there's one on a sandwich or in someone's lunch across a crowded room.So, I try to get a little something on the way in, but balance it with the wisdom of knowing that eating McBarfle's five days a week is going to make me fat as a pig. My recent screaming about weight & the need to get back down to fit weight made the cartoon above stand out. For those of you who don't know me too well, my dog is below:
...I think you can guess who represents me in the cartoon above. Ah, but it's a temporary phase, one which can be remedied by smarter eating, judicious workouts, & resting as needed.

See you at the track.

Enjoying The Journey

Athletic events, like life in general, are loaded with surprises. You save, you prepare, you get counsel and advice for every imaginable contingency, and boom shaka-laka (as my wife would say), something else pops up that you certainly did not expect. A water temperature that's much colder than you (or your wetsuit) can handle. A swim distance that's 200 yards longer, or rougher, than you initially suspected for the conditions. Shifting winds. One more flat tire than the number of tubes/inflator cartridges you are carrying.
I guess that's what makes sport - I used factors germane to triathlon, but running has it's own share of possible impossibles, such as floppy shoelaces, blisters, the severe need for a porta-john while the race is being contested, and so on, and so on - so much fun. You train, you plan your races, get your gear set up and tightened up to within an inch of its life...and life (for those of you who know John Lennon's music, I won't go further) happens.
I had my moment of 'oh, my God, if I am swimming like this, how in heaven's name will I get through a swim three times the distance in three weeks?' the other weekend. However, once I got on the bike and past the first 2500 yards of the ride - about the time it takes me to realize I'm back on terra firma (and as they might say in Boston, 'the more firma the less terra') - I begin to relax and know my body and my training wouldn't necessarily let me down.
Sure, I'm a terrible swimmer. But I found I was doing much better than many of my contemporaries in the wave. I was the one pointing out dangerous situations to the rescue swimmers as I breast-stroked by. I began, at that moment on the bike, to enjoy the journey I was taking.
It's something I didn't do last autumn as I trained for the marathon. I was so focused and fixated on that elusive goal of running in Boston in 2008 or 2009 I hadn't tapped into my own well (figuratively) to check whether my source was clear and sweet or brackish. Only in late November had I realized I was drinking from a poisoned well, so to speak. By that time it was beyond too late to fix the damage.
One of my athletes has finished two Ironman-distance triathlons and is presently training for a third. He's meticulous in his planning and his training. His employment, fortunately, allows him a great degree of flexibility in scheduling workouts. He's blessed with a wife who also is smart and athletic, so he has no lack of training partners. We talk on Friday evenings over beer and dinner, sometimes about travel, sometimes about sport, and sometimes we just talk. He reminded me, as I began to lay out my training plan for this spring, to enjoy the journey. It sounds like some sort of cop-out, especially to a guy who is used to picking up hardware at local and regional races if he's in physical and mental shape for racing. But when it comes to endurance events and multisport endurance events, if you're not an elite, the odds are very good you're going out to prove something to yourself. In the grand scheme of things, a 17-hour Ironman-distance triathlon experience is a droplet of spittle in the pool when compared to the nine months or more you'll spend training. Same thing for most marathon plans. An 18-week training build-up will probably total 800-1000 miles, all for a single-day's effort of 26.2.That is a lot of time for things to go right, or to go wrong. You can make it drudgery or fun. It's your choice. Odds are good the fun factor isn't going to adversely affect the outcome, so you might as well do what it takes to make the training fun. Don't judge the success or failure of the training necessarily by the outcome on race day, either. If you do that odds are plenty high you're going to be sorely disappointed.

But I bet if you look at some of the objective stuff on the way from the beginning of training to the race day, you're going to find you're tougher, stronger, faster, fitter, maybe even smarter about your body than you were before it all.

And being smarter about your own body will make you focus and appreciate what you can do more than focus on and kvetch about what you cannot.

Our Own Cross (Training) To Bear

Here on the Gulf Coast, autumn temperatures and conditions don't show until the end of October, and when they do show they make themselves known quite readily. My northern friends consider me a sissy for pulling out knicker tights when the temperature drops below 60 degrees, but once your blood has thinned out from two decades of sunshine and warm, humid conditions there's no turning back. Even rainy evenings (which during the summer present precious comfort to us until the sun returns and we feel like we are in the world's largest sauna) can be a tad uncomfortable, pretty much because we get those 15-20 mph gusts cutting through the dri-fit gear we've chosen for our run.

These conditions can motivate you to very strong workouts, like last Thursday's mile repeats. I won't say they were heroic by any stretch of the imagination, but they were pretty darn good. I think my training partner and I would have been 15 (well, maybe 20) seconds per mile slower if not for the ungodly amount of rain dropping on us. Frankly, we both wanted to get that workout over with...even our warm-up was a little on the warm side.

I wrote an article last year about winter running; something I feel thoroughly unqualified to talk about, since I can count the number of times I've run in snowy, slushy or icy conditions on the fingers of one mittened hand. However, it was more about dealing with darkness, decreased visibility, drivers in a hurry to get from point A to point B, and a thumb in the eye of all those folks who love to run with headphones. It's a love/hate relationship, but we're not going there today.

One of the things that most runners do not think much about is cross-training. Perhaps they do more in the northern climates because they are in snow and snow-related products for months at a time. Down here, we race from September until May, with a little bit of a break over the holidays; for us it's more of a time where training has to be focused because of the lack of daylight. Cross-training does some wonderful things, in my humble opinion. It keeps you from getting burned out over running; that variety is the spice of life thing, you know? You have the opportunity to do some of the lower-intensity training indoors, saving your quality work for those times when it's light enough to get out there and hammer. Perfect for guys like me who haven't completely learned the benefit of easy days. Didn't say I wasn't learning, but it's usually by necessity. And, if you have a spouse, partner, friend or significant other who isn't into running or doesn't run as fast (or runs faster) than you, cross-training can also give you both some quality time, depending on the activity.

When I talk about cross-training, I'm talking exercise activities that can be done indoors, such as spinning, elliptical trainer, treadmill running or swimming. There's also basketball, racquetball, aerobic exercise of all sorts and weight training that can be done, but I'll limit myself to the first four I've mentioned.

Spinning - think of a spectrum of exercise spanning an exercise bicycle and the Tour de France.
Positives: controlled conditions (no traffic), minimal equipment hassles (no flat tires), and the ability to work out at your own intensity level and still be in the vicinity of your fellow exercise enthusiasts. Oh, there's also the motivation of high-energy music (my instructor has played everything from Al Jarreau to ZZ Top in the past two years) and an instructor who tells you what you need to do, such as get up out of the saddle, hands at a particular position on the handlebars, pedal at a certain pace/heart rate intensity.
Negatives: doesn't help your bike-handling skills. Some instructors are less cycling-focused than others; while most Spinning instructors have a certification through Madd Dogg sports, they may (or may not) understand the focus of a cross-training athlete. You also have to find a place with a spinning class (local Y, fitness center, gymnasium, health club), then hope a bike is available. In my case, I like to use my road bike shoes, so I have to find a spinning bike that has Look-compatible cleats, or settle for platform pedals that accept workout shoes and aren't as efficient.
Burn: a 40-minute class will burn between 300 and 400 calories, depending on the intensity.

Elliptical trainer - lets you go through all of the motions of running or cross-country skiing, without the jarring of a treadmill. These are especially good during taper periods before a half-marathon or a marathon, when you absolutely feel the need to put a check in the got a 60-minute workout block of your daily to-do list; they're also great for rehabilitation from injury, say, when you break your arm and can't run for eight weeks.
Positives: most good machines have a variety of programs which allow you to work at a fat-burning or cardiovascular-stressing intensity, as well as hill climbing, interval and random programs. All of the information (distance, pace, calorie burn, heart rate, terrain) is right in front of you, so you are not left in the dark. You can let your legs and lungs feel the burn without beating yourself to death.
Negatives: most gyms don't have enough elliptical trainers, or the ones that are available have broken pulse monitors. A good solution for that problem is to take your own heart rate monitor strap with you to the gym. Also, without a television, music or other diversion, using elliptical trainers can be about as much fun as watching paint dry. When I do use an elliptical I'm always stuck in front of a television that has The Jerry Springer Show, or Fox News (now there's an oxymoron...) on...making my workout even that much more uncomfortable. You don't get the mileage in that you would cover on a treadmill or on the road. Also, if you have knee issues, some programs will trash your knees long before you stress your heart.
Burn: 40 minutes in fat-burning mode, without going too far over the line, will burn between 600 and 700 calories. You could do another 20 minutes, but the antidepressant use may outweigh the calorie burning benefits.

Treadmill - the original, and probably the most commonly used piece of indoor cardiovascular exercise equipment. I don't have to say much about this that you don't already know.
Positives: infinite variations on a theme. The ability to walk, jog or run on these things are a plus. Add the hill, interval, heart rate, and random programs to a good treadmill and you would wonder why any of us would ever go outside. The feedback on most treadmills is pretty much the same as elliptical trainers.
Negatives: doesn't replicate road running as well as most runners would like. Why is it I can run a 5:47 mile on the track and I cannot run a mile on a treadmill at 10.8 miles per hour? The shock absorbency of the treadmill deck varies from model to model, and a good model costs serious money. Also, while treadmills have ways to carry your fluid bottles and your music player, I've only seen one that has a ventilation fan...and even it isn't all that good. Watch me sweat all over a treadmill and you'll understand why I think fans are a great thing. And again, while I don't want to complain, treadmill choice at most gym facilities are like men and parking spaces at the mall: the good ones are all taken, the rest are way out there or damaged.
Burn: running an eight minute mile, you can burn about 500 calories in the space of 40 minutes.

Swimming - the one cross-training activity that I believe really transfers over to running.
Positives: no jarring, no pounding, and (relatively) easy on your muscles and joints. You know when you're improving in the pool, and when all of the techniques are falling into place. The discipline of breathing (inhaling especially) at the right time pays back dividends during that hard second mile of a 5K run. Also, there's not much you need to get into the pool, outside of a swimsuit and a pair of goggles. Everything else; kickboards, pull buoys, fins, caps, and so on...it's all optional.
Negatives: large learning curve. Technically a complex activity, unless you plan to limit yourself to easy breaststroke. Time your breathing wrong and you're likely to end up with a mouth full of pool water rather than air. Certain times of the year, especially in this area of the country (where lightning is a near-daily occurrence) can pull you out of the pool in a flash...pun intended. And most swimming facilities around here are very strict on pulling folks out at the first flash of lightning.
Burn: an hour of good, vigorous swimming can burn up to 600 calories.

So, it's a good time to start thinking about what to do other than just running during this fall and winter. The fitness and strength you can maintain over the dark months will shorten the time it takes for you to get back into form once spring arrives...especially if it keeps you from gaining those five or ten pounds that somehow jump on our bodies between the end of October and the beginning of January.

Kia Kaha. Stay Strong.