The “fitness center” at the Grand Hyatt Erawan was a joke.  I didn’t take any pictures of the facility itself which is a fail on my part, but what was awesome was the treadmill itself.  This was the nicest treadmill I have ever run on.  It was so nice I took pictures of it.

This thing had a really nice touch screen monitor with integrated picture and video advertisements and about 20 available languages.  The downside of this was that I couldn’t figure out for the life of my how to set up an interval workout, which is what I wanted to do.  That’s why I got stuck just running hard at a relatively steady pace.

The display was really nice and you could hit those arrows on the left of each data field to hide the info.  That was a big deal for me.  Running on treadmills can be boring sometimes and the worst part is having your time and distance constantly ticking along in front of your face.  “A watched pot never boils” has got nothing on “a watched distance counter never moves” for treadmill runners.  So being able to hide those was  a nice feature.  The not nice feature?  Advertisements for the hotel restaurants while you’re running.  Including full color, high resolution pictures of the food.  Yeah, counterproductive.

But that’s not all.  This treadmill interface was so nice it had GAMES.

They weren’t Civ V or Call of Duty or anything but they were good time killers and better than watching food adverts.  The touchscreen interface worked well but the game AI was pretty dumb.  So much so that the connect form game wasn’t even worth playing once you figured out how it played.  I’d also like to point out that I didn’t play the games while I was running on the treadmill but tried them while I was riding on the exercise bike the next night.

Lastly, I want you to notice the two small yellow levers on the side rails on either side of treadmill in the top picture.  Because I didn’t notice them when I started running.  One of those levers increases or decreases the incline and the other does the speed.  If you’re aware of those levers that’s a really nice feature and one that I did use eventually.  It’s way easier to adjust your speed and intensity by giving one of those levers a quick slap than trying to aim a finger jab at a touchscreen button.  The problem arises if you don’t notice those levers and you accidentally increase the incline by 1.5% without realizing it.  Yeah, don’t do that.