Saturday, March 21, 2009

Week 9: Treadmills in Cisco gym - Totally useless and utter waste!

After returning from Yosemite, I stepped up my training frequency this week. Until week 8, I was doing 4 days a week work out. From this week, I have started with 5 days a week work-out with one extra day of running. On Monday, I tried treadmill. After running outdoors, treadmill is borrrring! I did not have any motivation to run after 20 mins. So, I did some miscellaneous stuff and got out of the gym.

This new gym in Cisco is supposed to be state-of-art.. Now, I am not the one who normally holds on to old things and don't welcome new things.. But here, about the treadmills in Cisco's new gym, I have to vent out! There is no friggin' air.. All the elements on the treadmill are for namesake. There is an inbuilt fan but it doesnt give one iota of air. Because there is an inbuilt fan, there are no real fans kept near the treadmill and generally the whole gym is poorly ventilated.

What I like about treadmills, in general, is that it puts some discipline in me and I can't slack my pace. And just visually seeing my position on the track gives me the motivation to complete the lap.. But these state of art treadmills in Cisco do not have that simple graphical user interface. It has an ipod plugin and a TV built in. I have use for neither. The video distracts me from the run..and running with your neck bent down just puts extra pressure on the neck..Still worse, I tried watching ESPN and they were covering one of those car events that go round n' round.. That made me friggin' dizzzy while running! I have to struggle to use the LCD touch screen and make that disappear...

Some really demented, evil marketing guy must have passed these on as real user requirements to construct the treadmill ("From our market research, the customer wants to watch their own tv while doing the workout".. what he didn't tell is that "and oh BTW, my market research consisted of talking to my couch potato brother in law who said he may try going to the gym if the treadmills had TV on 'em "). I want one old treadmill and some real fan :-(

Not a happy camper,
Sai

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