Thanks to the Affiliate Summit Feedfront Magazine, I decided to give a treadmill desk a try. I was never keen on the idea before because I like my exercise time to be my head clearing time. But I got tired of sitting in a chair all day. And I figured that I could combine my “work walks” during the day with some cardio walks and runs and night.

My husband and I set out to rig up my existing treadmill into some kind of desk. I won’t bore you with details, but we were lucky that we had some great things on hand (first…a treadmill! Then other handy items like a docking station). We bought a shelf and two shelf racks at Lowes and built the “treadmill desk.” I put a cordless mouse and keyboard on it and tested it out. After some trial and error, it seemed perfect. I started using it for a couple of days, but the kids were still home for summer break and I was getting ready to head to Affiliate Summit.

Fast forward a bit and I have now completed my first full week of working on the treadmill. Pretty decent stats. I walked just over 16 hours during the day between Monday and Friday. I burned 3730 calories (over a pound!) and walked 34.5 miles. In addition to the obvious calorie burning benefits, here were a couple that I didn’t plan on:

• I drank a lot of water. I hate drinking plain water but was so thirsty that I more than tripled my daily water intake.
• I ate less snacks. Between the time that I spent on the treadmill and the fact that I wasn’t near the kitchen, I just wasn’t thinking about food.
• I slept like a baby. Combine the mental exercise of working with the physical exercise and I was worn out each night!

I’m hoping to get back to running at least a few days a week in addition to the treadmill work. I know that I need that cardio, and I just need to keep running to stay trained to be able to run the mini marathon again next spring. I hope that this is the first of many posts about my treadmill desk!