Cruel Runnings

Peloton and its competitors want to turn that tedious Victorian prison invention—the treadmill—into a high-tech home-fitness trend.

- Sheila Marikar

The great thing about running is that it’s just one foot in front of the other, over and over again. Step outside and move for a while at a moderately faster pace than usual, and you’re rewarded with endorphins, mental clarity, and justification for that heaping portion of pasta later on. The awful thing about running is that it’s just one foot in front of the other, over and over again. Step on a treadmill, and you immediately itch for ESPN or Netflix and start counting seconds as they accrue—anything to distract you from the thump of feet on rubber and the sense that the belt will whir until the end of time.

Treadmill torture has been with us since the Victorian era, when the British civil engineer William Cubitt invented a machine to give prisoners something to do with their time and energy. As many as 24 prisoners could fit on the first treadmill, which resembled a giant log roller and powered a mill that ground corn. If this sounds like something that could catch on today as a boutique fitness class, maybe with a trendier crop such as coconut in place of corn, consider that around the turn of the 20th century, treadmills were mostly phased out under a succession of reforms that sought to eliminate “monotonous and repressive misery.” Today’s electric machines absorb shock better and look sleeker, but the ones in most gyms retain a certain quaintness, with their last-gen phone-charging cables and omnipresent menu of Calorie, Heart Rate, Manual, Random, Hill.