Life Fitness T3-5

I promised a review of our new treadmill, and I'm now officially breaking that promise. I wrote a review, then read it, and realized that I don't have much insight or authority.

I will say that I like it very much, and it's a wonderful Survival of the Thinnest tool. With just a few button presses, I tell it to get my heart rate to 160 and keep it there for 30 minutes, and it does the rest. Well, I have to run and run and run, and for a few minutes I have to run up a rather steeper incline that I would like.

I run daily at 11.5 km/hour, which is almost exactly my half-marathon pace from last September. It gives me 2 or 3 minutes to warm up, then starts to crank up the incline until my heart is pumping at my goal rate. The incline usually gets to around 5% or 6%, but I've seen it go above 8%. Then the incline goes gradually down (and occasionally back up a little) for the rest of the run. Some days it gets all the way back to 0% incline, and once even that wasn't enough to keep my heart rate low enough, so it slowed my pace a notch. I bumped it back up manually, and my heart rate stayed near enough to 160 that it didn't try to slow me down again.

I have a couple of minor complaints about the treadmill. It doesn't show pace in minutes per km (or mile), other than briefly while one is manually raising or lowering the pace. Other than that, it just shows km or miles per hour. I'd say that most runners think in terms of minutes per mile, not miles per hour. Another thing is you have to take what it shows you on the display. If you want to know how many minutes you've run, and it instead happens to be showing how many minutes you've been in your target heart rate zone, well, you just have to wait. Eventually it will switch back to showing total minutes. The Precors I'm used to let you change the display at any time.

But those are minor quibbles. I'm quite pleased with it.

Currently my running streak stands at 25 consecutive days, with the last 21 on the Life Fitness. 25 may be more than I've ever done in my life. Certainly it is in the last five years.

I've noticed that my appetite at meal time is lower lately, but between meals I often crave snacks. This is the opposite of when I was on Shangri-La, when I rarely snacked but when meal time came, I was often pretty hungry. Maybe it was just the forced twice-daily two-hour flavorless windows that cut down my snacks; or maybe the oil was the snack.

In any case, the 25 days of running hasn't had a dramatic effect on my weight. My seven-day average has dropped only 1.6 lbs. since my running streak began.