Health and Exercise

If you want a high-quality treadmill, but you don’t want to remortgage your house to get it, you might have been looking at the Sole F85. It offers a lot of attractive options. It comes with a great warranty, has plenty of extras and is still foldable. But before you drop almost $2,000 on a treadmill, you want to make sure you are positive that it will work for you.

The F85 has received a lot of positive attention. This is in part due to the great warranty that Sole offers. As with all their models, you get a lifetime warranty on the motor and frame, but you also get a 5 year warranty on major parts and 2 years parts and labor. That’s an impressive warranty for a $2,000 treadmill. But Sole offers it because they are confident you will never need it. After a long history of designing some of the most durable treadmills around for major hotels, Sole knows how to build their stuff to last.

The treadmill certainly feels sturdy at a beefy 300 pounds. Even more impressively, it can handle up to 400 pounds on the deck. Sporting a huge 60 inch belt, it’s hard to imagine a person this treadmill could not accommodate. The rollers are still oversized on this model as well. They are 2.75 inches, which means they work less and last longer.

You get a huge 3.5 HP motor, which is akin to having a V8 on your treadmill, but you also get plenty of attractive extras. The display looks decent and offers you a progressive readout about your run, but that is to be expected on a modern treadmill. What you also get in an iPod or MP3 player hookup and some speakers. While they aren’t exactly theater quality, they sure beat putting your ear buds back in every five minutes. You also get some cooling fans on this treadmill. Again, they won’t dry your hair, but it’s hard to complain about a little breeze when you’re running.

The Sole F85 has a good price tag for what it offers, especially in terms of reliability. All the features in the world mean nothing if the unit it constantly breaking and Sole’s warranty covers that anyways. The biggest downside of this treadmill is for anyone who is expecting it to fold away. While the deck raises up, it does so at an angle. You won’t be able to get it as far out of the way as you will probably want. But with that being the only complaint, it is easy to see why Sole’s are so popular. You get unsurpassed reliability and enough extras to keep you running for a long time.