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!)…
That stationary bike looks almost as fast and clean as your road bike ...
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