I have a dreadful admission to make. In the last few years I’ve become progressively less physically fit until even I had to admit that “something must be done”.
So, in pursuit of the usual New Year’s resolution, I’ve been striving towards getting a bit more active. One of my Christmas pressies was a Pebble watch, which among many other functions has a pedometer. So I’ve been counting steps and trying to do a bit more each day. But progress has been slow, and some days I don’t achieve my target.
The answer? It has to be technology. What else? So for those rainy, cold, miserable days when I don’t even want to walk to the newsagent, we have:
It takes over all the free floorspace in the study, but does fold up so that we can actually sit at the desk and gain access to the bookcases. It was of course secondhand. These things cost a fortune new, and the vast majority never get much use.
I have to say that it’s everything I hoped for. I love it. It’s a Livestrong LS10.0T. Following the Lance Armstrong drugs debacle, the brand is no longer used for exercise equipment, although the Livestrong Foundation still exists to deliver cancer care, and there’s an associated fitness and wellbeing website. But the machines, which were made by Johnson, were solidly built and ergonomically well-designed.
It was delivered early this morning, so we assembled it and tried it out at once. The only drawback was that the pedometer on my Pebble watch is smart enough not to count treadmill steps as “real steps”, so remains obstinately stuck on the same reading no matter how hard I work on the treadmill.
But, of course, “there’s an app for that”. I’m not the first one to have encountered the problem, and so something called iTreadmill is now installed on my phone. You just start the app, pop the phone in your pocket, do your treadmill session, and it remembers all the relevant numbers. So all I have to do is to add real steps to treadmill steps and I can continue my activity tracking in the same way.
John Norman's Blog 