The Treadmill Library

Finding something worth listening to during a workout looks easy from the outside. There are podcasts by the million and audiobooks by the hundred thousand, and the treadmill has a bottle holder and forty free minutes. On the treadmill, few of those options turn out to work. For me they fail in the same way every time. Half of what I try is too light to hold any interest. The other half is so dense that I would need to be sitting still to follow it, and I am moving. My solution is to generate content instead of searching for it: a library of audio made for the treadmill, with each session planned around what will play. This library is the first tool built specifically for the accretion frame. That frame says movement works best when each session adds to something that grows, so the listening should also add to something that grows.

The two ways content fails are two separate measures: interest and density. Interest is the simple one. Most shows cover topics I would never read about, and I cannot make myself interested in a topic I do not care about. Density is less obvious. A dense argument needs pausing and rereading, and I can do neither while my body is moving. The accretion frame page has the research on why. In short, exercise uses up the same kind of attention that dense audio needs. So the problem was never that I lacked concentration and needed to force my way through. Forcing my way through belongs to my old way of exercising, which was driven by guilt, and ending that way of exercising is the purpose of rebuilding how I approach movement.

Content I find fits a workout only by chance, and content I generate can be made to fit it. One part of the library is the wiki, read back to me as short audio editions, so I can listen to my own notes while I exercise. Another part is the past day’s news, condensed into one morning brief and turned into audio before I go downstairs. The part I care about most is Chinese audio from Tsumugu, played with the text shown in step with it. Tapping a character shows its meaning, and tapping it again shows the whole sentence. This puts listening practice and the dictionary work already built on the same screen for the first time. Each item is made for the effort level of the part of the workout it plays during: lighter content where I am pushing hard, and denser content where the pace is easy.

The library also follows the rule the movement experiment sets for an artifact: it only grows. Every session moves something to the played list, and nothing is ever taken off that list. A skipped day leaves episodes waiting in the queue, and waiting has no cost, because no number anywhere can reset. If the design works, the regret I feel after a missed session will be about the episodes in the queue and never about me.

Something I remember from years ago supports this design. For a while I played Zombies, Run! and liked it. Each run came with a story episode that continued on the next run, and I collected supplies along the way. Pokémon GO used a related mechanic: walking added to a collection, and the Pokédex had more in it by the time I got home. What kept me coming back to both was what built up: the story got further along, and the collection got bigger. That is the accretion pattern in the form of a game, and it was in my own history years before the frame had a name. I would like to make a treadmill game along the same lines, and I am deliberately leaving it for later, until the library itself is running.

For now the build is small. The app is called tan (反), the old unit for a bolt of woven cloth, enough for one kimono. The name is related to Tsumugu’s name: 紡ぐ means spinning, and a tan is the measure of the finished woven cloth. The app runs on one phone, for one user. Content is generated at my desk and loaded onto the phone, so only finished audio ever plays on the treadmill. Whether an item is played or unplayed is the only state that matters, and nothing resets. The first real feature is the Chinese reader: audio with the text shown in step with it, and a tap on a character to see its meaning. Every other feature waits until I start wanting to have sessions.

Whether I start wanting to have sessions is the whole test, and it is the same test the movement experiment set. Three weeks in, a skipped day should make me think of something concrete: episodes still waiting, and a played list that did not grow. If I do not start wanting the sessions, I will change the content, and I will never try to fix it with discipline. I will keep the treadmill downstairs as it is and change only the audio that plays on it: audio made for one listener, at a density I can follow at the pace I am moving, added to a played list that only grows.