Got a treadmill

I found a treadmill for $175 on craigslist. It’s a proform 860 quiet, which I think originally sold for $800 at Sears stores. The darn thing is extremely heavy and was very difficult to get upstairs into the bedroom left empty when my oldest daughter went away to college. I was terrified I would let go of my end and my husband would tumble down the stairs with this huge thing on top of him.? Luckily, we got it upstairs safely…

I had fun playing with my new toy this weekend. It has some built in programs, some based on heart rate monitoring, and others just preset intervals. I tried one of the preset intervals for speed work, selecting one that only went up to a 1.5 incline to simulate a track workout. But the top speed was only 6mph, so it was too easy for me.

All of the preset programs cap out at 6mph, so they’ll all be too easy for me (I’ll have to try one that has hill work included, tho). I read through the manual, and there is no way to calibrate the presets to go at faster speeds.

I tried the heart rate monitor preset programs, but the treadmill doesn’t seem to be picking up the signal from my Polar Heart rate monitor, so nothing happened.

Then I noticed there is also an ifit program option. I looked at the manual, and figured out that all I need to use a program from the ifit website is a standard audio cable (with 3.5mm connectors at both ends). One end gets plugged into the treadmill, and the other end plugs into a sound device (mp3 player, CD player, or the computer)

The way it works is that the ifit uses a sort of morse code (chirping sounds) that are fed into the treadmill, and the treadmill interprets those sounds as instructions to change the speed and the incline of the unit.

I signed up for a 30 day free trial of ifit. I don’t have my computer or an internet connection up in that room, so I couldn’t just play one of the programs on the internet with the audio of my computer fed into the treadmill. So, I had to play the workout on my computer downstairs, while capturing the sound file. Then save it as an mp3, which I put on my mp3 player. Then I connected my mp3 player to the treadmill.

I had chosen a level 3 workout (that’s the hardest) that went up to 8 mph, with a max incline of 10. Click image at left to see screen capture. The incline during the 8mph interval was 4. OMG – it was soooooo hard. I had to stop several times to catch my breath and take a drink of water.

It was a bit hard to stay focused without a visual or audio cue how long each interval was going to last. I’m going to try and get my daughter’s old computer up there so I can watch the graphic that goes along with the workout.

ProForm Treadmills