Winter Training: Faster and Safer Indoors?

By GINA KOLATA
NYT

PAUL THOMPSON, a fast marathon runner and cardiologist at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, finally broke down this year and bought a treadmill. At age 62, he had had it with running on icy mornings when temperatures were in the single digits.

But Dr. Thompson is training for the Boston Marathon, which he ran last year in just 3 hours and 26 minutes. Will it help, or hurt, to do some of his runs on a treadmill?

In North Carolina, Michael Berry, a competitive cyclist and exercise physiologist at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., finds himself reluctantly driven inside by the cold weather, consigned to ride his road bike on a device that turns it into an indoor stationary machine. Helpful for training or not?

And at Princeton University, the women’s crew team was supposed to go out on the water in the beginning of February. But the lake where they practice has been frozen, forcing them to do all their training indoors on ergometers, stationary machines that simulate rowing. Same question: Does that help or hurt?

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