Treadmill adventure

A little experiment with our new treadmill gave me a bit of a surprise. I'd been using it with English units (miles & pounds). I'm used to using metric, but I just hadn't bothered to change it yet.

I'd set up what LifeFitness calls a "workout profile," which saves a workout for quick selection later. In this case, it goes for 30 minutes at 7.1 miles per hour, and it automatically adjusts the incline to keep my heart rate near 160 beats per minute. I like how the profiles work; with four button presses I'm up and running.

I thought there was a slight chance that it stores the unit setting as a part of the workout profile, so I could easily run my metric workout, and not have to set the global units to metric. My wife prefers English units.

So I set the treadmill to metric and reprogrammed my workout profile to go at 11.5 km per hour (fractionally faster than 7.1 mph). I also changed my weight from 180 lbs to 82 kg. It uses this to calculate kcal used. I don't really pay attention to that, but I thought that I may as well have it right. Then I set the treadmill back to English units, and started up my workout.

It accelerated to 11.5 miles per hour! Yikes!

I don't know about you, but I can't sustain that speed for anything close to 30 minutes. Or 3 minutes.

It also put my weight at a hyper-anorexic 82 lbs.

So much for that experiment. For now, I'm going to leave the profile at 11.5 some-units-per-hour, and just change the units setting before and after each run. It takes about 8 or 10 button presses, which is a mild annoyance. I just know that periodically I'm going to either forget to change it before, and go on a brief, wild run until I frantically hit the stop button, or forget afterwards and confuse and annoy my wife.