Torture. Just plain torture. Miles and miles of drudgery on what has got to be the most boring piece of exercise equipment ever invented. Well, now that I think about it, I take that back. That dubious honor really belongs to the Elliptical Machine. Could there be a more uninteresting piece of apparatus? A session on that thing makes visiting my Dentist a virtual fiesta. But, I digress. Back to the treadmill. I've always hated it and therefore don't spend a lot of time on it. I use it only when it is absolutely a necessity. If it's 115 degrees out or other hazardous weather or I need to get a quick workout on and I'm already at the gym or recently on vacation in Barcelona because it was accessible. What's not to hate about the treadmill or as my friend Ken calls it "the dreadmill." For starters: there's no scenery, no sounds of nature, I'm not really going anyway, someone invariably always seems to be talking on the treadmill next to me...and the list goes on and on. As does the treadmill session. Endless monotony. The longest I have run on the treadmill is 10 miles and those 10 miles moved by as quickly as the year when I was a little girl and I thought 12 would just last forever! Never ever to see my dream age of 13.
Which brings me to my next point. Who would create such a torture device and why? I thought I knew the answer to this question. But I'm a curious girl. Must be the Libra in me, if I believed in Astrology. So, for moments like this, God created Google. I thought there would be a rational explanation for the invention of the treadmill. After all, indoor cycling has a rational invention. Johnny G created Spinning because he wanted to be able to train indoors on days that he could not get an outdoor workout once he started to have an expanding family. Makes sense. This I can embrace. I was expecting this to be the rationale or something close enough to this for it's sister machine. Turns out, I was not even close. Google led me to my go to resource Wikipedia and what Wikipedia had to say totally blew me away:
"Treadmills were historically used as a method of reforming offenders in prison, an innovation introduced by Sir William Curbitt in 1817."
Now this was starting to make sense to me. Who else but the prisoner with time on his hands or no means to run outdoors would really be attracted to the sameness of treadmill running. I can't help but laugh out loud since I've often thought of my time on the treadmill as a prison sentence. Who knew I was this close to the truth of it all all along?
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