The Ride of Our Lives

Thursday 26 January 2012

When the going gets tough ... keep biking ...


Well, when the going gets tough – the tough go…err … umm .. on holiday?!  OK, I admit it – just as the first couple of weeks of our ‘official’ training programme started for ‘gay Paris’, I (that is Pomme Anglaise – the first of my blogettes) stepped on a plane to the Gambia for 10 days!  Can you blame me?  The cold cold January weather of London, the wind, the rain – all not great incentives for a novice cyclist like me..  so I packed my bags, checked  the hotel website that there was a gym at the hotel (I did – really, truly!) and stepped on the plane.

It was not until day 2 that I remembered to ( … oops!) find the gym.  It was not mentioned at the ‘orientation’ day and, after I managed to find it, I realised why.  To say the place I found was a gym, really needed ones definition of ‘gym’ to be stretched to breaking!  The room – well, corridor - was between ‘massage’ rooms (well, this was the hotel ‘spa’ after all) and was poorly lit (probably to hide the few machines in situ).  Inbetween a treadmill and step machine, there were 2 exercise bikes;  one did not work at all, the one I used, worked sporadically.  It was an old Kettler – similar to the picture. 
I needed to use an old rusty screw to make sure the saddle stayed in place and, to reset the basic computer that was attached to it by what looked like a piece of string, I needed to remove and reinsert the batteries.  However, I did manage to pedal around 10km a day on this contraption and this kept the leg muscles working.

Now I am back in London and back to the wind and rain, the London pedestrians and car drivers with bike myopia, I look back on this old cycle with some degree of nostalgia and wonder who is now adjusting that squeaky rusty screw and wondering how to reset the computer without taking the batteries out (if you are reading this, it is impossible, believe me!)…

1 comment:

  1. That stationary bike looks almost as fast and clean as your road bike ...

    ReplyDelete