Treadmills are bad for your brain

I started running in a time before there was really meaningful, portable running entertainment. Sure, there were Walkmans (CD, cassette, radio; my mom had every iteration). But they were cumbersome and, if the tech companies were being entirely honest with themselves, weren’t really designed to endure the endless repeated jolting up and down of a jog. If you ran with any regularity, you’d need a pretty hefty CD or cassette collection to be able to keep your headphones full, because you can only listen to most CDs so many times inside a week. I didn’t really become a runner (2008ish) until there were steadfast-enough iPods, and maybe more importantly, playlists, and then even more importantly, podcasts. I don’t think this is a coincidence; already running with no purpose feels a bit unnatural, and certainly very boring.

But in the years before that time, my high school sports coaches would prescribe the teams some amount of exercise between or before seasons. They wanted to minimize the time they would have to deal with whining teenagers who were so acutely sore from the first days of practice they could barely move. So mostly, they wanted us to run. Since the weather is often bad in upstate New York, I remember working up the nerve as a 14-year-old to confront my mom’s treadmill, parked in a windowed alcove of my parents’ bedroom.

My siblings and I had spent many good years basically trying to destroy this treadmill and ourselves along with it, turning the speed up all the way and then sliding toys slowly down the plastic protector ramp on the front until they made contact with the belt and went shooting off the back into the nearest wall. Testing complete, we’d then try to run on it at the top speed, falling and flying off backwards ourselves. As little as we were, the belt was short enough that it was incredibly easy to misstep onto the front plastic protector, or else hitch a stride when a foot accidentally followed the belt past the roller and off into the air. The margin of success was slim. When we got tired of that, we’d turn the treadmill off and then try to force the belt to run backwards with all of our weight, but without getting caught doing it, because our parents were sure this would break it.