If you live somewhere the winters are warm, go run outside.
If you live somewhere the winters are cold (and the roads are treacherous), you need a treadmill (this post is for you).
The value of convenience
Commuting to the gym to run on a treadmill is a minor inconvenience that quickly adds up to become a major pain. After changing into warm clothes for the 3rd time in a week you’re probably asking yourself ‘should I buy my own treadmill?’
The answer is almost certainly ‘yes!’, but if you are an analytical thinker like me, you probably want some concrete logic behind it.
I choose to apply a concept from finance known as the ‘payback period’, which is essentially the amount of time it takes for an investment to pay for itself. For example, if insulating your house costs $110 and saves $55 a year, then its payback period would be two years.
For simplicity, I choose to model the payback period for a treadmill based solely on time saved not commuting. If having a treadmill at home increases how much you use it compared to the gym, that confers a health benefit not captured here. I also assumed the price of a treadmill to be $1,000, but you can get a quality treadmill for less if you buy used (you can, of course, also spend much more than $1,000…)
Without further ado, below is the # of trips required to break even on purchasing an at-home treadmill based on your hourly wage and gym commute time:
Now, this technically is not a payback period because the result is not a unit of time, however, I did that for a good reason: how frequently someone runs varies significantly between individuals. The model is available in Google Sheets if you want to see the results in terms of weeks or personalize any of the assumptions.
Happy running!
Appendix
There is much to say about the art of assigning a monetary value to your time such as the inability to precisely choose how many hours you work, the marginal utility of time within a day and lifespan, and discounting based on the uncertainty of the future, but that is complicated enough to need a separate essay. If you’d like to hear more about that, leave a comment below!