Miles to Go - Day Three

Saturday 3^rd July

When I set myself the target of walking two hundred miles in July, it occurred to me that there were three things I couldn’t predict: physical injury, my moods, and the weather.  I could try to avoid physical injury by not pushing myself too hard too early, and as for my despondent moods, I could just try not to let them get the better of me.  But I was, I thought, likely to need a back-up plan in case we suffered weeks of torrential rain.

With this in mind, I booked a month’s gym membership at Shepton Leisure Centre.  There were a few other gyms, but this and the Movement Gym were the only ones that seemed to be offering reasonable prices; most of the others either advertised costs of ten times as much as Shepton Leisure Centre and the Movement Gym, or, even more ominously, didn’t put prices on their websites at all.  Some of them looked more like luxury spa hotels than just places where you might drop in for the odd workout.

So I booked an induction session at Shepton Leisure Centre for ten on Saturday morning, as they wanted to ensure that I knew how to use the equipment without injuring myself.  At a quarter to eight on Saturday morning, I checked where the leisure centre was – in Charlton Road, that’s the bit of the A361 marked in green on my street map, to the east of Kilver Street, right? 

I was about to set off when PDB11 pointed out that the street map showed a leisure centre on the pink bit of the A361 where it was still labelled Paul Street, and shouldn’t I look for a map on the internet to see whether this was the one I was aiming for?  So I looked, and it was.  I stuffed a pair of trainers and a pair of shorts in my bag, wondered whether I should also pack a towel, washing kit and complete change of clothes or whether the gym would be okay with my going home to shower and change, decided I didn’t care, and set off about eight o’clock, hoping I wasn’t leaving it too late to get to Shepton Mallet, find the leisure centre, and fill in all the paperwork they would expect me to do before the session started.

I got as far as Withy Cottages before I realised that I hadn’t packed a face mask, went home and got that, and set off again.  I hoped that I still had enough time to find the leisure centre, never mind paperwork.

Fortunately, being late meant I walked briskly, which at least functioned as a warm-up session.  I tried not to step on any snails (there were a lot of them out enjoying the damp weather, as it had rained in the night), but forced myself not to keep stopping to rescue snails from the pavement and place them on bushes safely out of the way of human feet.

I hadn’t left myself much time for appreciating nature in general, though I did see five dead birds on the pavement: one spotted woodpecker, one pigeon, two that might have been young starlings or adult something-smaller, and one unidentifiable.  Fortunately, I didn’t have the camera with me.

When I reached Shepton, I took the normal route I would for going shopping (turning right down the B3136, and up the High Street past various quirky boutiques and shops with a fairy-related theme, Madhatter’s Café, Peppers Deli, and the library), and turned left into Paul Street. 

Paul Street was new to me, and took me past a cheerful sign reading ‘Welcome to Shepton Mallet Prison’.  I knew rationally that the prison is now a museum, but it still felt incongruous.  It reminded me of a scene in one of Lois McMaster Bujold’s books where the notoriously hideous, windowless, designed-by-mad-paranoid-architect-in-centuries-past headquarters of the security service, which have been a running joke throughout the series, finally get bought by someone who wants to turn the building into a hotel.

I arrived at the leisure centre with half an hour to fill in the forms.  I assured the staff that I hadn’t had an epileptic seizure for thirteen years and it was nothing to worry about and I was otherwise physically healthy, and that yes, I realised that vigorous exercise could affect my mental health and I was willing to take the risk. 

I also established that I was allowed to take a pen and paper into the gym to write down how many miles I had run, cycled etc; that that I didn’t have to wear a mask while exercising; and that I not only didn’t have to have a shower before going home, but wasn’t allowed to.  I was able to nip into the loo for long enough to exchange my outdoor shoes and skirt for trainers and shorts.

By ten, I was ready for a kind man called Josh to show me around the exercise machines and explain to me how to wipe them down (squirt some disinfectant onto a paper towel and then rub the machines with it; don’t spray them directly as if cleaning a supermarket trolley, as it could rust them).  He then left me to play around on the machines for the rest of the 75-minute session I had booked.

This, it turned out, was the disadvantage to exercising like this: I was only allowed to book one 75-minute session in any given day.  The other disadvantage was that I was out of practice with fast, vigorous exercise, so I didn’t actually achieve much in a 75-minute session.  Also, as half the machines were cordoned off to prevent overcrowding, most of the rest were restricted to 10-minute workouts.

I managed ten minutes on the stepping machine (climbing 736 steps and burning a hundred calories), ten minutes on the cross-trainer (running 0.72 miles), and ten minutes on the running machine (0.65 miles).  Allowing breaks to recover between each burst of exercise, I only had about fifteen minutes left, which I spent pedalling lazily on the exercise bike (I could afford to take my time here, as nobody else seemed to want it.)

So – allowing for the fact that pedalling is not walking, and the stepping machine was about vertical rather than horizontal movement, I ‘walked’ the equivalent of about 1.37 miles in the gym.  On the other hand, walking to and from the gym, with a slight detour to the bakery on the way home, made nine miles of brisk walking, and I was home in time for an only moderately late lunch.  So I think the lesson to draw here is that the gym is not a practical way to clock up miles – but the stepping machine might help keep me toned for steep hills!

Miles walked today: 9 outdoor miles, 1 in gym.

Total miles so far: 34.