I bought a Horizon T900 treadmill at Dick’s Sporting Goods on black friday. I got it for about $1000, and paid an extra $200 for extended warranty. I also paid to have it delivered and assembled.
I wored out the used Proform in less than a year and a half. So I wanted something sturdier. I also wanted something that would go in excess of 10mph, since my newer faster training schedules have me doing intervals faster than 6:00 minute/mile pace.
The Horizon seems to be built sturdier than the proform. Probably not as stury as a gym quality machine. But it seems to be a higher end home machine. It goes to 12mph, so it will allow me to do intervals to 5:00 minute/mile pace. There are a bunch of programs on it, but I don’t use them. Since I am using a training schedule, I use the basic mode.

Now some of the things that I don’t like about the Horizon.

The cup holders suck. Actually they are not cupholders so much as bottle rests. They are angled, and the bottle rests in it. A cup or can would be likely to spill, since the holder is angled.

The treadmill comes up to speed too slowly. If I am going to run a quarter mile repeat at around 5:48 pace, the treadmill takes about the first 1/10th of a mile to reach full speed. So the first .10 miles is run slower than 5:48 pace, and only the the last .15 miles is actually run at 5:48 pace. The Proform which had a smaller motor, came up to speed faster.

The treadmill resets after 5 minutes of inactivity. If I am doing a long training run, I might take a break to go to the restroom, or whatever. By the time I get back, the Horizon has reset, and lost all the info about how many miles I have already ran. This is annoying. The Proform waited for 30 minutes or more before resetting.

The Horizon displays pace as minutes. Not minutes and seconds, only minutes. So if I am running as a 7:30 pace, it will display pace as 7.50. This is a pain since my training schedules have me running at paces like 6:20, 7:26, 5:48. So I have to pull out a calculator to do the conversions. The lower end Profrom displayed pace as minutes and seconds as would make sense. Horizon was just stupid on this point.

I emailed Horizon to find out if I could tweak a setting and maybe fix some of these issues. I go an email saying they would respond in 2 business days. They didn’t. I called them, and asked them directly. The guy told me no, that I couldn’t change any of these.

I find it hard to believe that the higher end Horizon treadmill is inferior in these functions to the lower end Proform!

Posted by Rob in Whatever on December 19th, 2007 |