Johnny America

 

What’s on? Home Shop­ping Network

by

Show: Great Outdoors

Time: 5:26 pm East­ern, Mon­day, May 30, 2005

Item: Pro­Form Cross­Walk Cal­iber Treadmill

Re­tail Price: $1108.92

HSN price: 649.95

607 sold

When I turned on the show “Great Out­doors,” I ex­pect­ed per­haps grills, pa­tio fur­ni­ture, maybe a tent. The tread­mill, not so much.

The Ac­tion: While the woman in green talked (you can tell by her heavy eye make-up that she wasn’t plan­ning on do­ing any ac­tu­al ex­er­cise), the woman in or­ange opined at length on the beau­ty of oth­er peo­ple not sweat­ing on your work­out equip­ment. I was im­pressed with her abil­i­ty to talk a blue streak while still treadmilling.

An­oth­er woman not seen here (laven­der shirt) walked pret­ty slow­ly through the ma­jor­i­ty of the seg­ment, even though she had less need to con­serve her breath than the woman in or­ange. Then, in­ex­plic­a­bly (per­haps in re­ac­tion to the speed at which these tread­mills were sell­ing…), she start­ed to run at a break­neck pace. Woman in green: “look at her go!”

The set, if you can’t tell, is odd. It’s vague­ly nau­ti­cal in that there are a cou­ple of life pre­servers hang­ing to­ward the back, but there is al­so ap­par­ent­ly an enor­mous fire­place — vi­tal to any home gym. If the park bench and the life pre­servers are their nod to the out­doors, I sug­gest the set de­sign­ers try a lit­tle hard­er next time.

Quota­bles: “When you sweat, you’re re­leas­ing a lot of stored junk”

“It’s an in­vi­ta­tion to say, ‘okay, okay, that’s enough of say­ing no. Now I know I don’t have to go out­side to do it.’”

What Makes it a Great Deal:

This item comes with a free six-month tri­al mem­ber­ship to iFIT.com. Here you can down­load work­out pro­grams for your tread­mill that sim­u­late walk­ing out­doors in var­i­ous scenic lo­cales. Of course, if you do that you’ll miss valu­able hours of shop­ping at home.

Filed under Commentary on May 30th, 2005

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