Karen writes: Spin bike arrived...

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My very own spin bike has arrived apparently all the way from the US and the hire one has been returned.   The new one is in a box because I am a cheapskate and wouldn’t pay extra to have it assembled.    I had a play with the one in the shop and pronounced myself satisfied, with my brief test it coped with me standing up and notching up the resistance without funny noises or any hint of a smell of burning.  I shall spread it out on the lounge floor and treat it like a big jigsaw and the kids can play in the box.

There was also an amazing machine I had a look at, at first glance it looked like a recumbent exercycle, then you realise that instead of pedals, it has steps...as in a 'stepper'.  But stepper PLUS, there were poles in odd places, extra foot pegs, a display the size of a laptop, lounge suite quality seat, and it apparently modified resistance according to heartrate and gave instructions when to shift which bit of you to which bit of the machine, amazing.   Who would ever need to go out the door to exercise with all that messy running, cycling and swimming with something like that at home? Amazing price too, at around $7000 it could end up a supremely expensive thing to pile spare clothes on.

I have also…shock horror… cleaned my road bike.   Because I do it so infrequently, I had forgotten some important points.  Like don’t use the car cleaning brush to do the chain, and after giving the chain a going over, don’t use the same brush on the white paintwork.  But some fierce work with a rag to get the grease off fixed that problem, come to think of it, I must remember to retrieve the greasy brush out of the carwash things.  Then some super strength spray to remove the possum guts which had been liberally applied to the underneath bits of the bike on Saturday (I hadn’t been paying attention to what was on the road ahead, Kate avoided it, I didn’t…yuck).   Now I can drop my poor machine into the shop, pretending that it is always in this well looked after state.

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