It’s not that hard to keep your pace steady and the watch does give you an on the fly pace and lap pace (lap distance is configurable) so it’s pretty easy.

Just letting you know your options. I got it pretty cheap at Amazon.

The watch is definitely cool. My only point was that if you want to do things like run at X MPH for X minutes, even with the watch (and next to impossible without it), the closest you could do would be to stare at the watch the whole time and constantly adjust your speed so that your pace *averages out* to X MPH over the course of the time you’re running. This is significantly different than what I was describing above.

Then if you take into consideration wanting to do stuff like intervals (2 min. @ X MPH, 2 min. @ X+2 MPH, alternating over N minutes), it’s extraordinarily easy on a treadmill, whereas I can’t think of a way of doing it (accurately) without one.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with preferring to run outside, if that’s what you enjoy. I’m not trying to convert anyone here, just explaining why I prefer what I prefer. As a side note, the dog walkers would fall in the negative category for me.

As for “contradictions”, I don’t see any at all. Like I stated in my previous comment, my sleeping conditions are perfectly acceptable (to me) right now, and I think I’ve done all I can to give clear examples of the kinds of exercise that require a treadmill to realistically do with accurate measurements.

I hope you see the contradiction:
“real” world of sleeping conditions
vs.
running on a mechanical machine, under a roof, in Ventura California.

Either way, have fun with whatever you get.

Everyone talks about the amount of time you spend on a mattress, since you obviously do sleep for a significant percentage of time per day. While I do get that, I think you also have to balance it with the reality that most people in the world (both presently and definitely historically) sleep on things that aren’t as nice as the mattress that we’ve got right now, so your body probably just learns to cope with whatever it’s sleeping on, within reason.

A stopwatch doesn’t quite do the trick either. (I’m assuming you’re talking about in the context of running on the street). You’d at least need to take the time to measure out the course you’re going to run and various points along the way you could use as milestones, and even then, you wouldn’t know whether your speed was off until you reached one of those, at which point it would be too late to correct it.

The point of the explanation above was that a treadmill forces you to keep an even pace, which you can’t really accurately do yourself. If that doesn’t matter too much for you, then no big deal, but I want to be consistent, so it’s a big benefit for me.

I do have a suggestion: buy a mattress and a stopwatch. Then you’ll know how fast you’re going.