The Indoorsman

A while back the wife wanted a good, fancy exercise machine and she settled pretty quickly on a Bowflex Treadclimber. Since we save time folding clothes by draping them on all the derelict exercise equipment in the house, I wasn't so easy to sell on the idea but the more I said "whatever" the more bells and whistles she "needed" on the Treadclimber. Eventually she decided that we could probably manage to scrape by with the super deluxe platinum model with night vision, GPS, OnStar, artificial intelligence and I don't know what all.

Trying to interject some reason , I told her that if she got the top of the line model the girl on the Treadclimber commercial would personally deliver it to the house and spend all day helping me set it up. If you've seen the commercial you can follow my logic easily. You'd think that would cause a de-escalation in the spec sheet but no. She was locked on and tracking. Before I knew it, a truck pulled up and dropped off the B-2 Spirit Bomber of Treadclimbers. Two guys, I think their names were Cletus and Alton, left it in the living room. The girl from the commercial never showed. I got it put together by myself and backed it into a corner in the dining room for its maiden voyage when the wife got home.

Danged if she doesn't pull out something called "instructions" that tells how to make it do all the stuff it does. I just want to know how to keep it from killing me while I am doing whatever it is that I am supposed to do on it but this thing has all sorts of computerized trails and routes and workouts and stuff in its memory. If you tell it you want to make believe you are crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, it will make believe you are going up one side, walking the whole length and going down the other. The LCD screen that tells you your speed, heart rate, how far you've traveled and all that will even tell you when to look to the left or right for landmarks. It told her to look to the left to see Alcatraz and sure enough, the gun safe is right there across the room. That's pretty close for a machine with no eyes.

So this thing tells you how fast you are walking, how many calories you are burning and how many flights of stairs you've climbed when you are done. It even remembers who's who so it doesn't make me cross the Golden Gate Bridge when all I want to do is go for a walk in the swamp. She comes down off the Golden Gate Bridge says "get on it. Where do you want to go?" I said "set it on Still Hunt." After a 15 minute workout it said I had gone 55 yards, stepped over 3 cypress logs and eaten 2 Slim Jims. Twice it told me there was a big buck to my left but it turned out to just be the decal on the safe. It's so realistic I might just quit the hunting lease next year and hunt in the dining room from the Treadclimber. Who'd have thought that safe door would really stop a 30-06?