The Noble Pro E8i: The 40,000 km review
An Altitude Centre treadmill has a hard life. Four times per day, every day, it’s run on at very high speed in our group training sessions, and must endure countless hours of use outside of those hours. And that’s just from our runners! Alongside runners, we have rugby players hitting their repeat sprints, boxers getting their intervals done, and mountaineers looking to max out the incline in preparation for summit season. When it comes to treadmills, our needs are therefore very high.
In August 2021, this came to a head when we were in need of new treads. Our existing commercial scale machines had taken a battering over 10 years of service to The Altitude Centre, and the time came to move on. When looking for a new manufacturer to work with, we had a few key demands.
First and foremost, the new treads had to be durable. Putting in that number of high speed running hours takes its toll! Second, they needed to be quick. When I say high speed, we knew that 20 km/h was non-negotiable for our runners and team sports athletes alike. With that speed came requirement 3; ride quality. The ride of the tread and its stability were all important for a good running experience at those high speeds. Just a few requirements then! And with each one, the pool of possible machines to work with shrunk slowly smaller.
Enter Noble Pro. “They’re designed for home use, but it’d be really cool to test them in a gym environment, and if anything goes wrong we can swap them out or fix them” were the words of Noble Pro’s then partnerships manager. A run test to check out the ride confirmed what we already thought; these are smooth treadmills. “Did I tell you they can do 22 km/h?” Perfect.
So, 2.5 years, tens of thousands of miles, and many the PB later, the verdict is in…
Ride
For many of our long-term clients, stability and ride quality were a concern when they first saw the new treadmills. They had been used to big, commercial treads, with a solid but forgiving deck and grippy belt. On first glance, a lower profile running board, with what looked like a smaller running area, raised a few eyebrows. “Running flat out? On that?”
I’d estimate that it took, on average, perhaps half an interval session for clients to be sold on the ride of the E8i. Concerns about the running area were proven unfounded (turns out the E8i has exactly the same area as the commercial treads, just with less overall footprint!), and everyone ran confidently at high speed and on high incline. Even our rugby players who had joined us to do their pre-season repeat sprint training were happy with the feel of high speed, high incline running on the E8i. The decks with just the right amount of give to be more forgiving than running on pavement, without being spongey, and stability at high incline was solid. A good start.
Functionality
What quickly became apparent was the functionality of the treadmills. Now, having the connectivity and apps built in is great, but in our environment few were using Spotify or Netflix during an interval session (those who did use it for longer, or easy running enjoyed the mental respite). Rather it was the Noble Pro Sidekick app that stood out. The ability to link into Strava, TrainingPeaks and Zwift was great for transferring data from the session to where it was most needed, and from our point of view the integration with softwares like VO2 Master has added an invaluable level to our testing offering.
In our day to day, the real plus point has been the utility of the Sidekick app during interval sessions. When it comes to interval training, quickly changing speed and/or incline to match the effort required is a must. Having a range of pre-programmed speeds and inclines to pick from on the screen made this super simple, even in the depths of a tough threshold interval. What’s more, the sweetspot between sensitivity and sweat resistance on the touch screen ensured there was no excuse not to up the pace!
However, speed isn’t the be all and end all for many of our athletes. Indeed for our ultra-runners and mountaineers, vertical is king. For our mountain athletes, we’ll often prescribe sessions based on achieving a set amount of vertical gain, either via treadmill, box stepping, or a combination of the two. Here we encountered a small issue early on, in that the new treadmills did not have a way of tracking elevation gain across a session. No matter, a quick check in with the team at Noble Pro, and sure enough the next software update saw the invaluable data field added. Talk about flexibility and listening to the customer!
So, in the short term, all was going very well. Feedback from clients was very positive, and Autumn marathon season 2021 saw many of our athletes cash in their hard training with new PBs in Berlin, Frankfurt and Amsterdam. But what of the durability. How have these self-proclaimed ‘home’ treadmills stood the test of time?
Durability
In a word, remarkably. I wouldn’t like to speak out of turn, but I wonder if even the team at Noble Pro are slightly surprised by how well the treadmills have stood up to the rigours presented!
In writing this piece, I went back through the data logs on each treadmill to check the stats. To date, the treads have put in over 40,000 km between them (mostly composed of high speed, high impact running, or high incline hiking in heavy mountaineering boots). An impressive data set against which to compare. However, more impressive is the condition they are still in. While a few are starting to show signs of the life they’ve led, one with slightly creaky incline mechanism and another (that came to us pre-loved) with a motor that runs a few decibels higher than the others, all are still functioning very well and there is nothing a service won’t sort out. In our classes, all continue to consistently achieve high speeds, and maintain their stability and ride quality to very high levels. On the software side of things,long term users have seen the Sidekick evolve over time to enhance the user experience, and new users find the app to be highly intuitive and increasingly easy to personalise to their preferred data fields mid- session.
The most impressive thing from our point of view has been the ease of maintenance. The belts are lubricated every 300 km as per Noble Pro’s directions, but aside from this they have had minimal maintenance and repairs. While previous treadmills have needed decks replaced frequently, there’s been no need to replace any hardware despite their hard life, and the software has continued to update seamlessly in the background. In all our time with the treadmills, we’ve had only one engineer callout, for a small recalibration of the motor that was easily resolved and should be simple enough for us to manage ourselves going forward. Impressive stuff.
To the next 40,000 km?
At the time of writing we are arranging a service of the treads, which seems to be in order after all this time. Given the experience so far, I’m fully expecting service reports to show the treadmills as having a clean bill of health, so here’s to the next 40,000 km!
Thinking about purchasing a Noble Pro treadmill? Arrange a test drive at The Altitude Centre’s London site by contacting James on [email protected] or complete the contact form below.
