In a DIY, workout from home world, here’s how to build a treadmill.

Some helpful advice for figuring out how to build a treadmill at home.

How to Build a Treadmill Step 1: Arrival

The treadmill will arrive at your house at the most inconvenient time possible. The crew will take a single glance at your door and claim the treadmill won’t fit and they can’t bring it inside. The crew will note “be careful with that computer” and point in a vague direction of the box. It’s unclear what they are referring to, but it sounds fragile. More on this later. The crew leaves, off to the next delivery, and you’re stranded with an overwhelming sense of panic.

Step 2: Getting it Inside

You are forced to bring it in yourself, which involves opening the box on your porch in sub-freezing temperatures and calling an unlucky friend to lug the individual pieces into your house. You’ll probably scrape the wall, but it’s ok, you don’t plan on staying in your house forever.

Step 3: Unboxing

Once the main pieces are in your house and you’ve shooed away your friend, you must unbox and unwrap the rest of the treadmill. You go piece by piece until you make a devastating discovery. The hardware package contains not one, but two allen wrenches. Some historians estimate that the screw was invented in 400 BC and the bolt appeared sometime around 1400 AD, but those two inventions and the thousands of subsequent improvements and tools to use them were apparently missed by the treadmill company, who chose to use the same hardware as a $9 mass produced cardboard Swedish end table. Get a towel for the bloody knuckles in your future.

Step 4: Organizing

After unboxing everything, the room will look like a refrigerator factory exploded, but this is normal. Separate all the parts into random piles so you have enough room to walk around without taking a metal part to the shins.

Step 5: Get an Engineering Degree to Read the Directions

You might want to take a quick pitstop, enroll in a local university and spend four years studying engineering in order to fully understand what the directions are telling you. Because without years of training, many decisions in the construction process will simply come down to best guesses and hoping for the best.

Step 6: Regret

You will eventually get to a point where you regret this entire endeavor, as the project is now getting the best of you. What even is the point of running anyway? Might as well take up something like bird watching or stamp collecting, both of which do not involve directions in 413 languages

Step 7: This Part Doesn’t Fit

At some point during the install, you’ll realize that a part just doesn’t fit. After frustratingly trying to attach and re-attach the part, you’ll take to the internet to discover that many people before you have faced the same solution. And the best conclusion is simply to deal with the fact that the part just doesn’t quite fit right. “It won’t hurt the structural integrity of the treadmill,” one commenter on Reddit will tell you. So grab a hammer and smash those parts together.

Step 8: Become an IT professional

Remember that computer the delivery guys told you about? Well it’s not so much a computer, but rather some kind of Android tablet that needs to be activated once you power up the treadmill. This includes a very slow hardware update, connecting to wifi and logging in to your treadmill brand’s website to activate. You know, how everyone loves to start a run. After divulging your deepest personal derails in the registration process, you are ready to run.

Step 9: Turn on Treadmill

After the construction and setup, flip the switch and listen to the sweet hum of success, as your new treadmill is ready to go. Just keep an eye on that left handrail, it’s pretty loose. Maybe even grab a new pair of shoes for the run. I recommend the Nike Pegasus Turbo. Happy running!