Tonight I got back on the treadmill to try the Sole app, which can sync to the treadmill through the magic of Bluetooth, which is neither blue nor has teeth.
The app has a measly 1.5 star rating in the App Store, but I didn’t check on why. It could be a single disgruntled ex-employee or maybe the app actively kills other apps while they innocently idle in the background. In any case, I use the Apple Watch to track my runs for real, so this app is just be a bonus or alternative to the monochrome LCD on the treadmill itself.
And that’s what it was. There are three views, one that closely mimics the treadmill’s display, but in color, and two others that show the same stats, but in different layouts. It’s nicer than the built-in display simply because it’s in color and higher resolution. It also makes it easy to start a timed run, something I haven’t quite uncovered on the treadmill’s actual controls.
Reaching out to interact with the iPad while running is a good test of balance, of which I have very little. Fortunately, you can still control the run from the treadmill’s panel and buttons, too.
For this mini-run I set a 10 minute goal and in that time I ran 1.51 km and my BPM was a low 148. This was with a speed of 10 km/h, so close to my normal running pace (I’m going to start recording the speed in my treadmill stats, but it will generally be set to 10 km/h). I burned 103 calories or two Timbits. Mmm, Timbits.
I next did a test walk to see how using a mix of incline and speed would turn out. This time I didn’t set a timer, I decided to walk until I had burned another 100 calories. Interestingly, my BPM was 145, nearly the same as for the run. It took me 9:56 minutes to burn 106 calories using the following settings:
Speed: 6 km/h
Incline: 10%
This put my walking pace at 10:17/km, which is pretty decent for a 10% incline. I sweated copiously. I may tinker with the settings a bit more, but this may be as close to the sweet spot as I’ll get, as the incline can only be set to a maximum of 12% and at 6 km/h I was able to keep pace, but nudging the speed up from there made it a fair bit more difficult to keep from moving toward the end of the treadmill and a spot on America’s Funniest Home Videos or whatever the YouTube equivalent is now.
Here are the stats for the run part:
Distance: 1.51 km Time: 10:04 Average pace: 6:38/km Speed: 10 km/h BPM: 148 Calories: 103 Total treadmill distance: 49.64 km Device used: Apple Watch Series 5
I think I may try doing at least a mini-run of 10-15 minutes every day, along with the longer 5K runs and, of course, the outdoor runs on the weekend, except when there are blizzards and such.
