French Revolutions

former Olympic gold
medallist and the first Englishman since Tom Simpson to wear the yellow jersey
in the Tour, might reasonably be expected to know something about preparatory
exercises. Holding a hand over the accompanying words (the mere mention of ‘the
muscle group at the front of your thighs’ made me feel squeamish), I was soon
mimicking Mr Boardman’s line-drawn simulacrum on a twice-daily basis. Pressing
a heel back to a buttock, pushing a wall, even lowering nose to (or anyway
towards) thigh with my leg up on a chair (I’d work up to the illustrated table
option just as soon as the sensation that my knees were about to snap forward
the wrong way seemed less compelling): these at least had an authentic air, the
kind of thing you might see footballers doing on the touch-line, albeit with
fewer daughters hanging on to their legs and necks. Others, notably the spinal
mobility and gluteus maximus stretches, cajoled me into whimsical poses last
struck when Miss Pillins asked 2Y to imagine we were spring’s first snowdrops
emerging from the frosted soil.
    In recent years, those snowdrops have
invariably been accompanied by a savage and ridiculous new gym fad, and they
don’t come much more savage or ridiculous than spinning. Melding an exercise
bicycle to the traumatic peer-pressure, barked commands and hysterical hi-NRG
soundtrack of aerobics, I’d been told that spinning was to a jog around the
river what bear-baiting was to yoga. It seemed sufficiently drastic. With a
week left I went off and spun.
    The airless spinning room at my local
gym consisted of a claustrophobic mass of exercise bicycles arranged in tight,
respectful semicircles before the instructor’s machine; settling myself
indelicately into the lofty saddle amid two dozen sinewy women in their forties
and a fat, red Irishman, it occurred to me that if (or ideally when) we were
all vaporised by Martian invaders the first member of the mopping-up squad to
poke his little green head round the door would imagine he had discovered some
hallowed chamber where obscure rotary homage was paid to King Spin. Only later
did I realise that with all that tiresome bellowed encouragement, those
clashing elbows, the soul-destroying, out-of-the-saddle, give-no-quarter
competitiveness, a spinning class was a static peloton, the closest
approximation to a desperate bunch finish I would ever experience.
    I’d sat next to the Irishman in the
hope of faring well by comparison, but after ten minutes of hectoring,
Flashdance and increased wheel resistance (‘Crank it up a notch, and one and
two and UP on the pedals and give me ten and GO!’) the sweat was already
cascading in an unbroken stream from lowered chin to pumping knees, flying off
the uselessly whirring front wheel and splattering toned, hairless flesh in a
generous radius. Part of the deal in gyms, and indeed in professional cycling,
is never to exhibit real pain or distress. Consequently, when we got into the
uphill double-time sprinting the instructor, perhaps noting my uncanny visual
impersonation of a man being exorcised in a sauna, slipped quietly off his bike
and sidled over. ‘Take it easy, eh?’ he whispered soothingly as Donna Summer
began to feel love. The phlegmy, rutting grunt that was all I could manage by
way of response did not help my case.
    After that I started lowering the
resistance control a notch whenever he said to turn it up, but, even so,
winding down at the end of the forty-minute session I felt very, very bad;
worse, in fact, than I had ever felt. The techno thump of a shell-shocked heart
filled my head; most of my muscle groups had disbanded and a leather-aproned
medieval butcher was clumsily yanking my hamstrings. As I shakily dismounted
into an unsightly puddle of body fluids, I had a strong sensation that my feet
had somehow been stretched and extruded into platform-soled appendages.
    ‘First time?’ said the Irishman, who
somehow looked further from death than he had before.
    ‘Last time?’ tinkled a
hollow-cheeked^ hawser-armed woman, her lilac crop top blemished with the
merest sprinkling of perspiration that in any case was probably mine.
    I didn’t (or rather couldn’t) say
anything in reply, but explained myself to the instructor after the following
day’s session. ‘That’s quite an undertaking,’ he said, implying that I would
need quite an undertaker. One of ‘his’ women had recently returned from cycling
over the Andes; another was off to the