Walking back along Rosia I was mindful Joe may be starting to get a little tired and so I kept a look out for places for us both to just sit down for a while but which would also allow him the chance to take a minute and have a rest. Almost as soon as I’d had that thought we arrived at what looked like an outdoor gym – and Joe’s eyes lit up?! How wrong was I, the man was off like an Olympian.
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Looking around the gym was amazing, it reminded me of being back out in the Far East where it isn’t unusual to see dozens of people outdoors, in parks and streets doing all sorts of yoga and dance in the fresh air. Part of me admired their healthy lifestyles which (at that time) was in stark contrast to my own (being a typical sailor ashore after weeks at sea); another part of me however thought they were all as mad as a box of frogs.
Here in our newly found outdoor gym there must have been a dozen different exercise machines which no doubt were individually designed to address different muscles in the body and while Joe was off doing his thing I decided to have a stab at a few myself.
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For a while I quite enjoyed peddling away with my legs on one machine and then winding away with my arms on another; I started to feel quite chuffed that I must be fairly healthy and able to do the workouts and I loved the idea that Joe was so keen to get stuck in too. As I started to feel a few beads of sweat on my brow I looked over at Joe to see how he was getting on thinking he was probably panting like a racehorse by now. Wrong again. The ‘retired engineer’ in him hadn’t even got on anything let alone tried it out; he’d gone around them all analysing how they worked! I should have known really, Joe has long been fascinated by the way things worked – a bit like the Dalai Lama who as a child loved taking things like watches to bits and putting them back together.
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With wobbly legs, floaty arms and a disorientated head (having just disembarked the last machine) I slowly walked behind Joe as we continued on down Rosia back to the Bristol. “Come on youth” he said as he shuffled off down the boulevard “Watching you doing all that exercise has made me hungry”.
I was right, those people (doing all those weird exercises) in the Far East were – as mad as a box of frogs.
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