My daughter recently asked me what these white flecks were on the Aviron Victory Treadmill in her playroom. Dried oobleck, I told her—a corn starch slurry mixed with water. One of the neighborhood kids had hopped on to play a walking game on the treadmill while also playing with oobleck, and I didn’t chase him off in time.
Can you imagine a treadmill that’s so easy to use and accessible that a 10-year-old might come over and beg to work out, for fun? That’s what the Aviron Victory Treadmill is. It reduces the barriers to entry for exercising, in one sense literally, because the deck is just 4 inches off the ground. It’s so easy to step on and off, and the games are so accessible, that I have trouble keeping kids off it, which is both a blessing and a curse.
Photograph: Jordan Michelman
Get Low
The whole purpose of getting an Aviron treadmill is to access the Aviron gamified workout universe, so let’s go over the membership first. It costs $29 per month, or $288 per year. Without the membership, you can still do basic things like see your metrics, create unlimited profiles, add friends, and access the MyAviron app (iOS, Android). However, an Aviron treadmill without a membership is like a Peloton machine without a membership. The draw is the content.
The sheer breadth of Aviron’s content is boggling when you first log in to the screen. You can do scenic routes, like walking around Coron in the Philippines or jogging through Ribeauville, France, in twilight. There’s live competition and streaming classes, coached classes, games, and something called Skyquest, where you use your speed and incline to control a little car driving through rings in the sky. You can scroll on TikTok, watch Netflix, or read your Kindle. Aviron adds new content constantly, like a program called Pros vs. Joes that wasn’t available at the time of publication, or a new Cardio Boot Camp strength-training program, for which you’ll need the company’s new loadable weight set ($299).
Photograph: Jordan Michelman