• Rich Barlow

    Senior Writer

    Photo: Headshot of Rich Barlow, an older white man with dark grey hair and wearing a grey shirt and grey-blue blazer, smiles and poses in front of a dark grey backdrop.

    Rich Barlow is a senior writer at BU Today and Bostonia magazine. Perhaps the only native of Trenton, N.J., who will volunteer his birthplace without police interrogation, he graduated from Dartmouth College, spent 20 years as a small-town newspaper reporter, and is a former Boston Globe religion columnist, book reviewer, and occasional op-ed contributor. Profile

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There are 8 comments on Tread Attentively on That Treadmill

  1. I can’t believe I just read a whole article, with 4 gifs, about people falling off of treadmills, and did not see one person fall off of a treadmill.

  2. This article was so educational. Thank you Mike for enlightening me about the treadmill. So the next time i feel like hopping onto the treadmill, i will leave my phone on the table, not speed up and jump off while its still running and wear my safety clip! Thank you for probably saving me from hurting myself.

    Looking forward to your next tip!

  3. A good article, and quite important one.

    I would also add that people should be careful with face towels. I’ve often seen them fall on the belt and that can be disastrous.

  4. Thank you for pointing out that people should use their common sense and judgment by not following the crowd. Follow the safety instructions when using equipment and forget about looking weird or getting made fun of.

  5. I need to quote this article, “24,000 injuries sent treadmill users to the ER and accounted for 30 deaths between 2003 and 2012.” I looked for further information on this but couldn’t find the data. Between 2003 and 2012 is sort of an interesting period to look at. In 2003, the majority of us didn’t have/own smart phones, I believe smartphones took off in 08-09… You touched on the topic, but I wish I could find some real numbers showing treadmill injuries before smart phones compared to the number of injuries after smartphones became common. My guess is the data would show there was/is an increase incidence of injury as the smart phone era began. Would you agree? If you Google, “number of car accidents per year” and click images you will see the numbers were dropping but then begin to drastically increase around 2011. Smart phones getting more common then? We want to believe we are advancing, obviously we are in one sense but how individual humans use the technology causes us to regress in different ways.

  6. I saw quite a few people on treadmills at the gym hop on them thinking they can go full speed running. Those people ended up face down on the floor very quickly. Treadmills are very dangerous if your not aware of just how powerful they are.

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