My treadmill desk has been working out well for work. In fact, it’s working good enough that I decided not to buy anything more expensive for now.
However, I’ve done a bit of tweaking on my end. For the first couple of months I was walking at a 2 mph pace in two 1 1/2 hr segments. However, my legs and knees were really starting to kill me. I couldn’t figure out why there were hurting so much since I was walking so slow. I talked to Jaeger about it and he pointed out that I really should be stretching1. I decided to give in and I now do a hamstring/calf stretch for a minute on each side after finishing a walking segment. I think that probably fixed most of the problems I was having. In addition, I noticed that my normal stride felt more comfortable at 3 mph so I upped my speed a bit. Finally, instead of doing two 1 1/2 hr segments, I changed to three 1 hr segments.
Since I’m still walking for 3 hours but am walking faster, I’m walking about 9 miles each day. Theoretically, anyway. In practice, I don’t walk while I have meetings because my treadmill is loud. So during most weeks I end up with about 9 miles three of the days and 6 miles the other two days. However, this week was abnormally meeting-free so I got 9 miles in each day for a grand total of 45 miles this week on the treadmill.
The one thing I still have to figure out is my shoes. My regular outside shoes are a fantastic pair of hiking boots. However, I want an “inside” pair of shoes for the treadmill so I’m not tramping dirty shoes all over the basement and treadmill. I purchased my current pair of inside tennis shoes at Ross and they worked really well for step aerobics but aren’t holding up on the treadmill. The soles are wearing out and I’m developing blisters in spite of the first aid tape I’ve been faithfully applying to key parts of my heels. Of course, multiple sites on the internet all seem to agree that walking shoes should be replaced every 500 miles which sounds like a lot but really isn’t . . .
Walking 45 miles this week sounds like a lot but I’m not entirely sure how much exercise that should count as. I dusted off my old heart rate monitor2 and it turns out that I average about 98 beat per minute while walking, not a very aerobic pace. However, I assume walking an easy 3 mph is still better than sitting still at a desk.