The road to nowhere...

Thank you for your kind wishes over my very womanly battle with man-flu. I am now chock full of antibiotics and am back on the bike.

Not le Tour de France, le Tour de Legs.   I'm talking about spin class and I'm strangely obsessed.

It's totally ridiculous of course and made all the more ridiculous by all the wonderful images flashing past me on our television as my sport mad husband keeps up with the Tour antics.

I like the Tour - I like it for the scenery, the villages, the mountains, the drug scene, the days when a dog dashes out in front of the peleton and they all go down like nine-pins. I like it for the sheer grit and guts it  must take to do it. I liked Lance Armstrong's first book, I like the cyclists and their crazily defined legs and groovy gear. I like Paris on the final day.

But all that has nothing much to do with my new thing. You see in spin class you ride in a sweaty peloton but you're going nowhere. Fifty odd people pedalling their hearts out, sweating up imaginary mountains and not moving an inch.

In 500 years time when they're carefully excavating the ruins of Auckland (a la Pompeii when one of the city's volcanoes finally blows its top) they'll laugh their space-helmeted heads off at the sight of all the dinky bikes in a row with no wheels.

But ridiculous or not, I am into it.

I am not a gym-going kind of girl. I've flirted with it in the past - aerobics classes at uni  and a couple of years membership of a flash London gym where it was warm and almost felt sunny with nice reception staff who gave you a fresh white towel when you arrived.

This gym is a gym-goers sort of gym. Nice people, rubbish showers, sweaty rooms, packed studios and me. Sweaty, slightly trimmer and grinning like an idiot.

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(First three images from here)