At his office, Maggs helped me slip on a specially designed pair of shorts before I stepped onto the treadmill he bought a few weeks ago from the AlterG company of Fremont, Calif. He raised a plastic bubble that enclosed the device up to my waist, and I zipped the shorts to it, creating an airtight seal.
Like any other treadmill, this one had speed and incline controls, and I started walking, just as I have during countless other warm-ups. But then I began to take weight off my feet in 1 percentage-point increments by pumping air into the clear bubble. Slowly the air pressure began to support me.
At 80 percent of my body weight, I felt as if I could fly. I told Maggs to go home; I’d be here running all day. At 20 percent of my body weight, the least the machine allows, my toes were barely touching the treadmill.
Medical benefits
“You feel invincible,” said Lachlan Leach, who was walking slowly on the treadmill when I arrived, the first steps of her rehabilitation for a stress fracture in her foot. “You feel like you can just take off running.”
She can't; that wouldn’t be good therapy. But placing a small load on the stress fracture while it heals, and staying in shape rather than eliminating all cardiovascular activity, will speed her recovery, Maggs said. Some health insurance may cover the therapy, he said.
“It’s very hard to tell a runner not to run,” said Maggs, who estimates that about 80 percent of his patients are runners and triathletes. We are an obsessive lot, prone to persisting through injuries no matter how much long-term damage we’re doing.
Joe Kehoe swears the treadmill saved his half-marathon in March. The 35-year-old Haymarket resident had been training diligently for the race when he strained a calf muscle trying to alter his gait.
“I would have had to completely stop running,” Kehoe told me. Instead, Maggs treated him, then put him on the device at a slower speed than normal and at about 60 percent of his body weight. As his injury healed, Kehoe gradually increased both. He said he ran a personal best in the 13.1-mile race.
And at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, wounded veterans, most of whom suffered limb damage from roadside bombs, are using the treadmill.
“It lets them run with confidence,” said physical therapist Bo Bergeron. “They’re not going to fall. And if they stumble, they’re not going to hit the treadmill.”
The treadmill isn’t perfect. The model for athletes sells for $75,000; the one designed for medical use costs $30,000. Therapists can’t get at a patient’s legs to help while he’s walking. It gets really warm in that bubble, the shorts and air pressure are somewhat uncomfortable and when you remove the air you feel the toll in your quads. So far, there are only a handful in this area, according to the company’s Web site.
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