Reading on a Treadmill: Take 3

Pic courtesy Taumengineering

How easy is it to read and burn fat on a treadmill? I've been trying to figure this out for a few months now. See the attempts below.

Reading on a Treadmill

Reading on a Treadmill: Take 2

This week I decided to read Neil Strauss' Emergency whilst treadmill walking at the gym. The book is broken up into 5 main parts. I read in intervals, breaking to work the abs between each “part” of the book. Here's how long it took:

Part 1 (introduction): 17min

Part 2: 1hr 53 min

Part 3: 2hr 53 min

Part 4 (incomplete): 60 min

I make this a total of 6943 minutes: 6 hours 3 minutes. Correct me in the comments if I'm wrong...

I gave up some way through part 4 as my legs had seized up, as had my brain.

Advice if you're going to do this:

1. Walk at a steady pace. 5Kph was fine. The slower you walk, the longer you can work for.
2. Make sure your breaks are long enough to give your legs a real rest. At least 5 minutes.
3. Drink LOTS of water. Not only will you sweat a lot, you won't be eating any food, so you'll need it to keep your stomach full and fend off hunger pangs.
4. Pick a treadmill not too close to any speakers. Even Kissfresh can get irritating after a few hours, and you want to keep the music as “background” as possible. Also try and find one near a window. You're going to be here a few hours, so you might as well get all the sunlight you can.

I got more than halfway through the book. Where The Game was an autobiography / guide to pickup, Emergency is more Strauss' account of learning modern-day survival techniques for preparation against a range of loosely defined dangers that today's society can unleash on us. Although interesting to see what a man will do to “protect” himself from supposed perils out there in the big bad world, Strauss and the survivalists he encounters come across as slightly paranoid doomsday-willers, stocking up on guns and knives for security reasons, gleefully preparing against hypothetical threats, and killing and eating animals just to see if they could go through with it. I couldn't help think, why put yourself through all this when an apocalypse HASN'T happened? Surely you'd MAKE yourself do these things after the asteroid / zombie outbreak / plague HAS hit us? But I suppose it's easier to learn in a current, comparatively safe contemporary environment.

Hmm. Worth a look. An interesting read.