It was the moment I’d sworn would never come. In early 2018, I moved with my family from Los Angeles to rural New Hampshire. In California, my life had revolved around the outdoors: walking the city’s hundreds of public stairways, hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains, biking along the Pacific coast. When my wife and I got to New Hampshire, we made a winter plan. We were going to stay active—cross-country skis and snowshoes, season-pass lift tickets and ice skates. What we were not going to do: trap ourselves at home, whether on the sofa or on what we viewed as a sofa that burned a few calories—an indoor exercise machine.

Then, the accident happened. In early January 2019, I slipped on the ice outside my house. I’d spent 20 years doing silly things in so-called extreme sports and had never been seriously hurt. And then, just walking down the driveway, I damaged my spinal cord so badly that another spill could have been catastrophic. Surgery could avoid that.

“But it’s going to be a long and difficult recovery,” the doctor told me. “No heavy lifting. No running. No biking.” For six months I needed something that would be low-impact and safe. “Do you own a treadmill?” he asked.

No. And I was thoroughly against owning one. I knew that the treadmill was the single most popular fitness machine in America. (After all, I work for a company that tests and recommends all sorts of things, including treadmills.) I also knew that home treadmills often end up sitting disused and are later dragged out at garage sales, but are often left unsold because they’re so heavy and hard to transport.

Or maybe they end up sitting disused because of this: There’s nothing more boring, I thought, than a treadmill. I’d always placed a premium on thrills when it came to exercise, whether that meant hiking a wilderness trail, jumping my mountain bike, or sighting a rare bird. A treadmill? Inside? That wasn’t me.

But now I had no choice.

For anyone who has ever used the infinite sidewalk of a treadmill, it probably isn’t a surprise that the machine has a reputation for being a torture device. But what may be surprising is that the torture is actually by design. Inventor William Cubitt subscribed to the “no pain, no gain” philosophy. His “Tread-Wheel,” which was described in the 1822 edition of Rules for the Government of Gaols, Houses of Correction, and Penitentiaries (published by the British Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline and for the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders), was presented as a way for prisoners to put in an honest day’s labor. Prisoners used treadmills in groups, with up to two dozen convicts working a single machine, usually grinding grain or pumping water, sometimes for as long as eight hours at a stretch. They’d do so “by means of steps … the gang of prisoners ascend[ing] at one end … their combined weight acting upon every successive stepping board, precisely as a stream upon the float-boards of a water wheel.”

Though various names were given to the device—tread-wheel was another early candidate—the term treadmill stuck because both syllables actually fit the meaning. Cubitt’s prototype, installed at the Surrey House of Correction, used the power of the human stride to grind corn: As a tool of punishment and profit, the mill was as important as the tread.

This was considered to be more humane, at least compared with earlier methods of punishment, which centered on hanging or exile to British colonies. Hard labor on a treadmill for a fixed term, the theory went, could rehabilitate an offender, who could then return to society and family. Never mind that the prisoner was often left shattered by the experience. Oscar Wilde spent two years on the treadmill as punishment for “gross indecency with certain male persons.” In a poem about his incarceration, he wrote: “We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns, /And sweated on the mill: /But in the heart of every man /Terror was lying still.” Wilde never recovered from the brutal treatment, and he died three years after his release, at age 46.

The treadmill was less common in America, but several were installed in East Coast cities, including one on the site of what is now New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. That particular machine—housed in a two-story building just off 26th Street, near the East River—was notorious enough that one of its operators, James Hardie, wrote a book about the device. In The History of the Tread-Mill, Hardie noted that it wasn’t medieval-style agony that bestowed such infamy upon the apparatus—the treadmill wasn’t the rack or an iron maiden, after all. It was ennui, stemming from the treadmill’s “monotonous steadiness and not its severity, which constitutes its terror.”

By the 20th century, the treadmill had been abandoned, the casualty of a trend in Europe and the US toward eliminating hard labor in prisons, with the last vestiges of the system—chain gangs—mostly vanishing in the 1950s. But unlike rock-pile and field work, the treadmill itself was, by the end of World War II, poised for a comeback. The device may never have rehabilitated a single prisoner, but treadmills themselves were about to be recast in a life-saving role.

One of the biggest changes Americans underwent as the 20th century progressed was how they died. In the early 1900s, the top killers were infectious diseases: tuberculosis, pneumonia, and influenza. By 1910, though, heart disease had moved into the number one spot, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (PDF). And apart from the years of the great flu epidemic—1918 to 1920—it didn’t just stay there: It began crowding out other causes of death, growing at a rate that alarmed public health officials. As the most prolific killer in 1921, cardiac failure accounted for 13.6 percent of total fatalities. By 1940, that percentage had doubled. By the 1960s, nearly four in 10 deaths in the US were attributable to heart disease.

But how could doctors prevent a bum ticker from leading to a trip to the cemetery? First, they’d need a way to test whether a patient’s heart was healthy. Listening with a stethoscope for irregular rhythms could do only so much. In 1924, Dutch physician Willem Einthoven was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing the electrocardiogram (ECG). General Electric built on that work, introducing a portable version of the machine three years later. But ECGs could be used only to gauge extremes: for patients who were totally at rest and not in trouble, or for patients who were in cardiac crisis, when the information the devices yielded would likely have come too late.

What was needed was a machine that could gradually raise a patient’s heart rate with a steady workload, which could be easily increased and decreased. As it happened, the prison treadmill had, in a way, survived—various versions were available, powered by horses and other livestock. Away from the farm, an urbanizing America was undergoing a fitness boom. The 1920s saw the development of machines that today’s gym members would find familiar—numerous bodybuilding, cycling, and walking apparatuses, all designed to battle the effects of increasingly sedentary lifestyles. For apartment dwellers, that meant a very modern, treadmill-like “Dog exercising device,” patented by John Richards in 1939. In the late 1940s, Dr. Robert Bruce, a cardiologist and researcher based at the University of Washington, added an adjustable motor to a Richards-style treadmill, and he and his colleagues began testing patients. They’d hook a test subject up to an ECG and then set them to walking on the treadmill. By carefully adjusting the speed and incline, the doctors could detect subtle changes in heart rhythms. In 1963, a paper was published that described how a treadmill test could be used to detect previous heart attacks, angina, or ventricular aneurysm. This became known as the Bruce protocol. Variants of the Bruce protocol form the basis for today’s treadmill-based cardiac stress tests.

Dr. Kenneth Cooper had been an Army and Air Force physician in the 1960s, and he’d used treadmills to measure oxygen consumption and endurance in test pilots and candidates for the space program. When Cooper left the military, he began conducting similar tests on regular patients at his Dallas clinic. In some cases, he found hidden heart problems and ended up saving lives. Cooper’s initial work was controversial. The idea of stressing the hearts of healthy people was seen as reckless by some members of the medical community, who categorized the device as one that endangered human health: “They thought we were going to kill people on the treadmill,” recalls Cooper, who’s now 88. Instead, he says, “the treadmill became a way to determine whether somebody is sick or is going to get sick.”

Cooper’s work in detecting heart disease led to a bigger career shift. He’d always been a runner, and after completing a master’s degree in public health, he came to believe that regular exercise—specifically, the kind that got you breathing hard and raised your heart rate—could help prevent a heart attack. In 1968, Cooper published a book outlining his exercise plan. The title of the book, and the name of the form of exercise, was Aerobics. And Cooper’s version of aerobics—Jazzercize and leg warmers notwithstanding—was centered on running.

The aerobics movement was boosted not just by Cooper’s book but also by a group of athletes who somehow made running seem cool. Among them were Steve Prefontaine, an Oregon runner whose cult following grew after he died in a 1975 car crash; Jim Ryun, who broke the world record for the mile run in 1967, and who remains the last American to have held that mark; and Frank Shorter, who won the gold medal in the marathon at the 1972 Olympics. Millions of ordinary people started running. One person who became preoccupied with running was a mechanical engineer named Bill Staub, who set a goal of running an eight-minute mile, a time Cooper had prescribed as being a standard of proof for high fitness. But Staub, who lived in New Jersey, encountered a problem that nearly all runners who lived in four-season climates faced: a wall of winter cold. The medical treadmills housed in Cooper’s clinic were never meant to be used in homes. They were huge and expensive. Some gymnasiums had similarly bulky and expensive treadmills, but they were hard to use and sapped the get-up-and-go convenience that had made simple running so popular. (Gyms themselves weren’t terribly common in the 1960s and ’70s. And where they did exist, they were mostly focused on weight lifting.)

What Staub wanted to do was bring that convenience indoors. In his machine shop—which had previously been dedicated to building fuel nozzles for jet engines—he cleared space and built a simple prototype: a pair of smooth wooden cylinders linked by a wide belt and powered by a motor with a simple on/off switch. That ultimately developed into a production model that featured 40 steel rollers, an orange belt, and a pair of dials—one to automatically turn off the device after a set session time, and the other to set the speed of the motor. Staub, in a tribute to Cooper, named his company Aerobics Inc. His treadmill was called the PaceMaster, and it cost $399 in the late 1960s (which is about $2,800 in today’s dollars).

“He was the pioneer for the use of the treadmill in the home,” Cooper told The New York Times (which is now Wirecutter's parent company) in 2012, when Staub passed away at the age of 96. Staub’s company had sold tens of thousands of treadmills by the time it folded, in 2010. Its closing was barely noticed in an industry that had grown to include dozens of companies competing in what is, by far, the single most popular exercise-machine category for both homes and gyms. In 2017, home treadmill sales reached $999.8 million; sales to gyms were $348.9 million, according to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association.

The SFIA estimates that about 53 million Americans use a treadmill at least once a year. Some 28.5 million people are considered “core users,” logging an average of one session a week. What’s weird about this popular machine, though, is people’s conflicted—nearly maddening—relationship with it.

Gym treadmills get used. They’re typically among the most popular items in health clubs—treadmill-based workout classes were, for instance, the fastest-growing category on the ClassPass universal gym membership system in 2018. Studios that use treadmills as part of their full-body workouts are growing rapidly, too: The national fitness chain Orange Theory has 1,200 studios offering HIIT-style (high-intensity interval training) workouts that primarily use treadmills. Home treadmills, on the other hand, often end up gathering dust. How bad is treadmill disuse syndrome? While researching this article, I found a story in The Providence Journal that featured an interview with the owner of a used-fitness-equipment store. Secondhand treadmills are usually in like-new condition, he said, because so many people use them only once or twice. Their only cosmetic issue? Blemishes from coat hangers.

In my own treadmill quest, there were several things I was seeking. I wanted a treadmill that connected by Bluetooth to my phone’s health-tracking apps. I wanted one that I could mount an iPad on. (I’d been saving two seasons of the new Star Trek: Discovery series for a major binge-watching session. This was my chance.)

My first stop was our very small village’s community Google group: “Anyone have a treadmill they’re not using? I’ll come get it.”

Within minutes I got a dozen offers begging me to please, please, please come get treadmills that were languishing in basements and attics. These treadmills were almost always very close to new in terms of condition, but they were also all more than 10 years old. (I was sure there had to be newer disused treadmills around, but maybe a decade is the point at which people finally give up on the idea.) That meant no connectivity, so I went shopping. I ended up buying a basic Bluetooth-enabled treadmill (this meant forgoing Wirecutter’s current treadmill pick, which doesn’t offer connectivity). It didn’t include things like classes or virtual scenery, but it did have a simple connection to my phone’s health app and a charging port and tray for a tablet.

The treadmill arrived February 1.

By Valentine’s Day, I was out of fresh Star Trek episodes.

There was, of course, an endless array of choices if I wanted to continue spending my 30-minute indoor walks binge-watching shows. And it was absolutely true: Mindless entertainment made the time pass quickly. But that was the problem. I didn’t want to be mindless.

I wanted what seemed impossible, paradoxical: to be engaged while literally going nowhere.

Like William Cubitt, folks out there are trying to turn the treadmill into a productive tool. Unlike the British inventor, though, treadmill modernists are determined to remove the device’s torture factor. Right now, I don’t think any single method has fully solved the problem, but the offerings are intriguing and diverse.

But that was the problem. I didn’t want to be mindless. I wanted what seemed impossible, paradoxical: to be engaged while literally going nowhere.

The simplest approach comes from Zwift, which is attempting to turn the treadmill into a game. “We’re trying to banish the dreadmill,” says Zwift marketing communications director Emily Mullen. Zwift began as a virtual world for cyclists. You’d buy a sensor for your indoor bike trainer and get to explore—solo or with other members online—digital locales ranging from an alien world to replications of real cities on your TV screen or tablet. The Zwift cycling app had a runner’s Easter egg for quite a while—it required a series of screen taps, along with a Bluetooth shoe pod, to access it—and the hidden feature was popular enough that the company surfaced it as an actual feature in 2018. Zwift is tons of fun, especially when you run in a land called Watopia, a bizarro universe of giant robots, underwater passages, and science-fiction architecture. And the cost of entry, since Zwift is device-agnostic, is low: The footpods cost around $30, and a Zwift subscription is $15 a month. Zwift also offers full integration with external apps, like Apple Health and Strava.

If Zwift is about turning the treadmill into a game, then Tread—from Peloton, the maker of virtual cycling systems—is about turning the device into the most sophisticated, varied urban exercise studio you’ve ever attended (here’s our review of the system). You’re required to buy a beautiful—but pricey—dedicated treadmill (starting cost of entry: $4,295) and subscribe to a catalog of classes that currently features thousands of options from a growing roster of instructors. You’ll also need a $40 monthly membership and a fast Internet connection in order to access those classes. Instruction is the key to Tread—the company doesn’t want people to see the machine as a device for mimicking foot travel. “We’re not doing this just for runners,” says Maureen Coiro, Tread’s senior product manager for hardware. When I mentioned my sci-fi binge-watching to Coiro, she quickly switched into mega-coach mode: “You can motivate yourself to do this without entertainment.” What she meant was that the classes themselves are entertaining, and the combination of energetic instructors, virtual companions, and pumped soundtracks banishes the listless, passive experience of the typical in-home treadmill workout. When people first hear about Tread, they often experience massive sticker shock (as they did with Peloton’s bike). But where I live, there isn’t a studio or a gym offering anything close to that kind of treadmill workout within an hour’s drive. People who love Tread and Peloton really love the systems because the combination of software, hardware, and variety provides the motivation they need.

But what if you are a truly dedicated runner—what if you really want to run on a treadmill in a mindful, focused way, rather than to just tally up the miles or distract yourself with TV or imaginary landscapes or a pseudo-studio? Running coach and author David Siik believes that the treadmill is the ideal tool for systematic, goal-oriented training. What’s missing, he says, “is a way to help runners determine what those goals are and how to reach those goals.” Siik says that by using the treadmill to “micromanage the metrics, you can create a workout with a lot of poetry and pattern in it.” Siik’s initial attempt to distill that idea came in the form of a 2015 book, The Ultimate Treadmill Workout. But learning about treadmill exercising from a book doesn’t feel terribly intuitive, so for the past five years, Siik has been teaching his Precision Running program in person at Equinox clubs in Los Angeles. His classes have become popular enough that Equinox is launching a chain of treadmill-only, Precision Run studios. Siik is evangelical—and idealistic—about his mission: Running, he says, is a fundamental human activity, and when a runner gets in the zone, what happens is the opposite of boredom. There’s a deep, almost primitive pleasure: “When you peel back the onion of fitness in general, all you have is the run. It’s ancient and DNA-driven. That’s possible on a treadmill.”

All of these approaches—gamification, immersive studio replication, Zen-of-running—feel like they have potential. But I was looking for something more. My injury had spun me into moments of deep depression. Winter was tough enough for me, but I’d planned to spend every Sunday of the coming summer walking the New Hampshire section of the Appalachian Trail. Now I was supposed to avoid carrying anything over 5 pounds, as well as to avoid any risk of falling, until at least July.

“When you peel back the onion of fitness in general, all you have is the run. It’s ancient and DNA-driven. That’s possible on a treadmill.” —David Siik, running coach and author

The treadmill was getting so boring that I considered looking around for some accursed corn to grind up. If you can’t beat William Cubitt, join him. But what I really fantasized about was a treadmill with a big screen. That big screen would give me places to go—maybe a walk around New York’s Central Park, maybe a visit to Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows, maybe even a hike on the Appalachian Trail. Those videos would be shot from a first-person perspective. And they’d be automatic. I’d hit “Go,” and the treadmill would start moving at whatever speed I requested. I didn’t even bother to fantasize that it might mimic climbs (though nearly all treadmills have an incline feature) or descents (something few treadmills have done in the past).

The Appalachian Trail part? That doesn’t exist—probably to the relief of genuine thru-hikers, who would, no doubt, find it blasphemous. But the treadmill that goes up and down, matched to a POV virtualization? That’s real, says Colleen Logan, vice president of marketing at NordicTrack. “The way to make a treadmill interesting is to make it possible for every workout to be different. For it to be hands-free. And to make it touchless—so that the speed and incline and resistance happen the same way they do in the real world.”

NordicTrack thinks it has cracked the boredom problem by turning the treadmill not into a game or a studio but into what’s basically an environment. All NordicTrack treadmills mate with the company’s iFit system, which offers virtual workouts filmed at key destinations around the world (most recently added: the Grand Canyon, rim to rim, and Machu Picchu). Of the treadmills that work with the system, six of them—ranging in price from $1,800 to $4,300—offer decline as well as incline. (How much decline, as well as whether and how big a built-in touchscreen the device comes with, are major factors in determining price; the company’s top three treadmills, which offer the most decline, are categorized by NordicTrack as “incline trainers,” and reach maximum ascent/descent grades of -6 and 40 percent, respectively.) The iFit devices also let you draw a path on a location in Google Maps, load it into iFit, and then follow it in Google Street View. (iFit is free for the first year and about $40 a month after that. You also have access to Peloton-style classes. Peloton does also offer guided “Scenic Runs,” though it doesn’t allow automatic control or incline setting.)

In Los Angeles, I had founded a large group dedicated to walking public stairways. In New Hampshire, testing an iFit-equipped NordicTrack, I was able to quickly map one of my old walks—3 miles, 13 public stairways—and then “do” the walk using Google Street View. Did it feel like the real thing? No, but it was fun and exciting anyway, and as I continued to create routes, I realized that the guided-tour element of iFit isn’t just a big win for winter-bound walkers and runners. It could also serve as a major motivator for people (like me) who are restricted from “real” routes by a disability or an injury.

The iFit system, to me, is as close as a treadmill comes to breaking free of Cubitt’s punitive model. There’s an irony in this, since Cubitt saw his device as something to be used not only to punish people but also to rehabilitate them, and getting better is my goal, as well. I’m willing to try anything that will motivate me to keep working toward that. The big question will come after I get better and I’m able to hike for real. Clothes hanger or virtual adventure tool? That I’m actually excited to find out is a huge step forward.