![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The sixteen study subjects were fed a strictly monitored diet and were observed with what he calls “an atrocious degree of attention to detail” to see what they did differently. ![]() Levine first began thinking about walking in 1999, after he conducted a study at the Mayo Clinic about why some people seemed prone to gain weight while others seemed immune, even when they ate exactly the same amount. He now sits so rarely that colleagues have taken pictures of him seated during meals just to prove that he does sometimes make use of a chair. “I was on my bottom a lot: watching Monday-night football, Tuesday-night basketball, ‘Simpsons’ every night,” Levine said. He was so chubby as a kid that his nickname was Puffer, and the day before he put his desk together his wife had told him that he was getting kind of fat. While Levine had a professional interest in studying the science of calorie burning, his motivation was also personal. James Levine made his first treadmill desk, in 1999, from one of those tray tables with a telescoping base made to fit over an elevated hospital bed and a secondhand Sears treadmill that he got for three hundred dollars. Any treadmill can be used to make a treadmill desk, though many manufacturers now provide models that are specific for desk use, without handrails and equipped with motors that are designed to run for long hours at slow speeds. It doesn’t look much different from the kind of standing desk that Winston Churchill used. Essentially, “treadmill desk” or the variant term, “walking workstation,” just refers to a surface that’s high enough to accommodate a worker who is walking on a treadmill rather than sitting on a chair. They walk at one or two miles per hour, which is slow enough so that it doesn’t interfere with typing or talking or reading. If you’ve ever read a magazine while running on a treadmill at the gym, you’ve almost worked at a treadmill desk. “One of the greatest inventions in the world is telephone calls on treadmills.” He added, “That is my dream for all Americans.” We talked for about a mile, and when we were finished I told Levine that I had now achieved one of my treadmill-desk dreams, the two-way walking phone conversation. “But this was my calling.” After medical school, at Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, in London, he interned at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota, and has been with the clinic ever since. “Pretty strange for a twelve-year-old,” Levine said. Levine, who is fifty years old, grew up in England, and was the sort of geeky kid who was happy to stay up all night observing his pet snails to see how far they would move, or to sit in an ice-cold bath for an hour to try to figure out how much body heat he had lost. “That’s my treadmill.”ĭespite his warning, I didn’t really hear anything odd in the background except an initial clunk and growl as his treadmill started moving, and, anyway, the soft whirring of my own treadmill probably cancelled it out. “You’re going to hear a bit of an odd sound,” Levine said. He had just stepped out for coffee and was on his way back to his office, and he managed to open the door, put down his coffee, step onto his treadmill, and start walking without skipping a beat. I was already on my second mile of the day when I called him. James Levine, the leading researcher in the marvellous-sounding field of “inactivity studies,” at the Mayo Clinic’s Scottsdale, Arizona, campus, and the most prominent of walking-desk partisans. That happened not long ago, when I spoke to Dr. I had been eagerly awaiting the first time I would have a phone conversation with someone who was also walking at a treadmill desk. I would like to have it be known that I have walked while buying shoes online while Photoshopping pictures of my cats while e-mailing my son’s soccer coach and while paying bills. I got my treadmill desk about three months ago, but I’m still in the announcement phase. It’s a lot like the early days of cell-phone calls, when the simple fact that you were doing what you were doing seemed so amazing that most conversations consisted largely of exclamations about the amazingness of the call. And now you know the biggest problem with working at a treadmill desk: the compulsion to announce constantly that you are working at a treadmill desk. I am writing this while walking on a treadmill. ![]()
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