Everyone’s always complaining about how hard it is to exercise and stay fit, especially during the holidays.
Compared to other ways that you can spend time, exercise is indeed often a chore. This is especially true when you’re talking about things that aren’t exactly exciting. Like walking. Absent the need to get somewhere or get in shape, it can be hard to imagine choosing to walk.
But!
Walking is very good for you. Imagine if you could do it all day, while you were working. If we office drones have demonstrated anything during the past few decades, it’s that we can spend hours and hours multitasking at our desks. Given the opportunity, who wouldn’t like to work and work out at the same time?
Enter the treadmill desk.
I spent December working and walking on one made by a company called LifeSpan. It’s pretty basic: a treadmill and a height-adjustable desk that shows you how long you’ve walked, how far you’ve walked, how fast you’ve walked, how many steps you’ve taken, and how many calories you’ve burned.
The treadmill desk arrived with “white glove” setup service. I imagined something really fancy, perhaps even a butler. All it meant was two dudes stopped by the office to set it up for me. That was nice, because I don’t think I would have wanted to do it on my own. It’s actually two pieces of equipment, the treadmill and a height-adjustable desk. It cost $2,000 for the rig I tested. The delivery guys said they’ve installed a lot of these. I asked how many. They weren’t sure, but they said very many. I asked if either of them would like to work at one. They smiled, but didn’t answer.
Side note: This thing is enormous. Even the box is massive. The contraption takes up most of a row meant for two desks here at WIRED.
Once it was up and running, I got on and adjusted the height of the desk. I’m about average height (5 feet, 9 inches) and I enjoyed the sensation of towering over the office. When truly tall people get on it, like Gadget Lab editor Mike Calore, they look like a tower. A big, bearded tower.
When you start the desk up, it moves slowly. Really slowly. Like, just 0.4 mph. This is the speed at which you might walk through a pitch black room when you’re really drunk and must make your way to the bathroom. Max speed is 4 mph, which means you can run on it if you really want to, but you can’t run that fast.
On the first day especially I found writing really hard to do. Reading was for the most part fine, but trying to focus on longer pieces was difficult.
I walked about 3,500 steps the first day (OK, it was a half-day) that I had the desk set up. It felt like a lot, even though I normally do 8,000 to 12,000 steps per day. I was really tired. Also, every time I got off, I noticed I felt a little woozy. It was like having sea legs.
The next morning, I dressed for WIRED’s Christmas party. I immediately realized I’d made a terrible mistake. Wingtips and a treadmill desk don’t mix. Trust me on this. I went back to the house and grabbed some clothes to wear while working. On the way back, San Francisco’s light rail service, Muni, broke down because Muni is perpetually awful. I had to get off one stop before I usually do and began hoofing it a few blocks to the office. Then I remembered the desk. Shit. I took the bus instead and wondered Is it possible this thing will make me walk less?
That second day I took just over 7,000 steps on the desk.
Everyone in the office was curious about the thing and people kept dropping by my desk. My productivity, already dwindling because of all the walking, effectively fell to zero. Two co-workers made the same joke within an hour: They wanted speed buttons on the other side of the treadmill so they can turn my speed up for me. Even now, a month in, people want to try it. Some of them want to walk with me.
On the third day, I walked into the office, saw my treadmill desk, and immediately and involuntarily cursed. I’d attended two Christmas parties the night before and gotten totally wrecked. After one hour and just 3,282 steps, I had to stop — and I typically work at a standing desk. But I couldn’t bear it any longer. My knees and back were killing me. I was lightheaded. I felt a little vertigo. It sucked. LifeSpan told me I needed to work on the desk for about two weeks before I could really get a sense of it. If the next seven days go anything like the last three, I thought, I wonder if I’ll make it.
By the next week, however, I’d reached an acceptance phase. I no longer felt like I was plodding toward my inevitable death. In fact, I’d started having fun with it.
I perfected the ironic glide off, for example. [#embed: https://vine.co/v/h2hZ7MeQeDP/embed/simple]
I did the queen wave. [#embed: https://vine.co/v/hQwQrFbZeT5/embed/simple]
I did the moonwalk (badly). 
I tried rolling on it with a desk chair, which was completely amazing. And yet, it didn’t seem dangerous or stupid enough. So I tried skateboarding.
But enough goofing around. By my third week, I was getting more than 5,000 steps every day and more than 8,000 on many days. This was in addition to the steps I normally take, so I had effectively doubled my daily step count. I found that I could wear normal clothes without having to worry about getting them sweaty (although I would typically shed my sweater). I also noticed that everyone wanted to try the desk. People still laughed at me, but then they asked if they could try it.
In the end, I lost three pounds during the month of December — during a time when I gorged on holiday food and candy and, aside from two lonely bike rides, made a point of not exercising in any way, shape or form whenever I wasn’t on my treadmill desk. I genuinely felt better at the end of most days too. It was a great experience in weight loss and health. But for working?
Eh… Not so much.
My big takeaway with the treadmill desk is that if I need to do anything requiring concentrated attention and focus, I must stop walking. I can reply to emails and make calls and do lots of quick hit tasks, but when I really need to dive in, walking is a distraction.
Of course, your mileage may vary.
