Make your workout worth it on this exercise-powered boat
Summoning the energy to get to the gym at all is enough of a challenge, but now an Italian design firm wants to harness your workout to power a boat.
The firm, Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) partnered with gym equipment makers, renewable energy and urban design groups, and architects to design what they are calling the "Paris Navigating Gym." It's a boat that moves down the Seine River using the energy from your workout.
The 20-meter long boat can hold up to 45 people, all of whom will help keep it moving along. With riders on specially designed bikes, human energy will be used, along with energy captured from solar panels and photovoltaic cells on the gym roof, to activate electric propellers.
At each exercise station users will see a screen showing how much energy they are producing, so they can understand how they are part of the effort. The boat's design includes a transparent glass covering that can be opened during warmer months.
The awesome design is currently just a prototype. However Daniele Belleri, a spokesman from CRA, told Mashable that while there's no concrete plan to implement the workout boat, it could one day exist in real life.
She said the boat could be hauling gym-goers down the river within 18 months, which is how long they anticipate it would take to build the fitness vessel. "We can absolutely say that we are already exploring the possibility of actually constructing the gym boat," Belleri said in an email, giving us some hope this could be a reality.
CRA shared their exercise boat of the future in a November newsletter as part of an open call for designs in Paris. It is based off a 2008 concept, a "River Gym" in New York City, but this new design incorporates a French aesthetic, especially given the setting. Très bon.
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
