What's wrong with treadmills in Africa?
Thursday, May 17, 2012 at 4:12PM ;)
~ Look closely.... What's missing? ~ I'm at Swahili Language school which happens to be equipped with a full gym - a true surprise.
Take a good close look at those two treadmills. What's missing? Need a hint? Remember that this is Africa... Still can't figure it out? That's okay - I missed it the first time too. The power goes out all the time here, just like in Nairobi. Sometimes it's just a brief blip and sometimes it's out long enough for the school to turn on their generator. To protect expensive equipment, there's a time-delay surge protector on the wall there behind the treadmill. We have those on our refrigerator, washing machine, and so on to protect the equipment from surges and spikes when the power is restored. It usually delays anywhere from 15 seconds to 5 minutes after power stabilizes before powering up whatever is connected to it.
Now, if you happen to be jogging on a treadmill at a reasonable clip, 15 minutes into your run and the power goes out what do you suppose happens? Yup, that treadmill stops cold. It's a little bit disconcerting. That happened to me the Monday I arrived at language school. I didn't fall off when the track stopped but I did run into the control panel. And you have no way of knowing how long it'll be before you can resume your run, so I moved over to the cycling equipment which does NOT plug into the wall.
What do you suppose I did on Tuesday? You guessed it. I figured there was no way I'd be so unlucky twice in a row and I would really pay close attention so just in case the power did blip again I wouldn't come down on the console. Well, about 10 minutes into a run I got distracted daydreaming and sure enough the power blipped. Crash - into the console I went. Back on to the stationary bike.
I haven't tried again. And the power hasn't blipped again during my workouts for the rest of these two weeks. Figures. So let that be a lesson for you - if you have a treadmill, don't just protect the equipment with a time-delay circuit. Protect the runner too by putting a UPS on that thing!
-Shauen