A couple of weekends ago Dave and I fixed punctures on both wheels of my bike. Actually I asked Dave to show me how to change a bike tyre which was my way of getting the punctures fixed. I do know how to change a tyre now but I'm sure I'll forget the next time one needs changing.
I have this ideal vision of what bike-riding is like. In my mind I can just nip into the garage, grab the bike and travel off to the gym, off to the shops, off to the park with ease.
Normally when I go to the gym I drive. This is a shocking admission because it's probably just a 10-15 minute walk. Why do I drive? Well a few reasons actually.
A workout eats into my precious evenings to the tune of about two hours and adding a walk at either end of that time takes it to about two and a half hours.
When the evenings are dark it's not the nicest of walks, particularly travelling under the A12 bridge which is dark, gloomy and the graffiti isn't by Banksy.
I do feel guilty about driving which is why the punctures had been bugging me. In my ideal world the bike would be the solution helping me to get to and from the gym, quickly and safely.
Well I tried it out tonight. It took a while to get the find the lights and get them sorted, figure out where to store things (phone, keys, money, cards) and get the bike out of the garage. A bit more convoluted than I had imagined but getting to the gym was excellent. I was able to freewheel almost all the way there. It took just a couple of minutes to get there.
The trouble with freewheeling on the outbound journey is....it's uphill for the return journey after a workout. But even so, the return journey wasn't bad. It took about five minutes and probably gave me a better workout than the bike in the gym which I would normally have used for 20 minutes.
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