Can you make running on a treadmill less dreadful?

There is a reason they call it the dreadmill. For someone who is used to running outside, running indoors is quite boring and I constantly need to challenge my brain with different things to focus  on to be able to complete a workout on the dread.

I am terrible at running for longer than 15 to 20 minutes at slow speeds on the treadmill. I will find a way to get off and either take a swig of water, check my phone or go to the bathroom at every occasion I get. If I can manage to break down the run in smaller segments, I am able to run indoors for 45 to 60 minutes without thinking about it.

One of my favorite workouts is to do a fartlek session (Swedish word for Speed Play) where you run different intervals at different paces. For my workout today, I did a 10 min easy warm-up and then a session of 3  times (3 min fast - 1 min slow - 2 min fast - 1 min slow - 1 min fast - 1 min slow.)  So in total it was 9 fast intervals and 9 slow ones. I ran the fast ones at increasing speeds. Started at 12km/h-13-14, then 13-14-15 and 14-15-16 to finish. It was quite a hard workout as 1 min of recovery jog is quite short.

After that, I did a 5 min cool down and called it a day. Total 7km or 4.5 miles and 6km/h average because of the warm-up and cool down. Here is the Strava Link to this activity :

The famous dreadmill in my pain cave!

Terrible weather outside!