Editor's Weekly Ramblings 13

Friday 13th June 2003

The Joy of Indoor Rowing

Indoor Rowing doesn't involve water. This is its principal advantage over the Sir Steve Redgrave form. No getting wet. No early morning trips to a boat shed. No cold changing rooms or gusty winds. No 50 mile trip to the nearest river. None of that nonsense. On the flip side of course there is none of the scenery or comradeship that parking your arse in a moving boat might bring. But then I can live without scenery and comradeship early in the morning. These are joys that should be strictly relegated to after 9am.

I recently acquired my own little part of the indoor rowing dream. My Beny V-Fit Artemis Rower which I bought from exercisezone.co.uk. It only cost £105 (I note that they have now put it up to £125), because it was a 'return'.

This means that some fat man had bought it whilst eating a cream cake (his last one - obviously). Felt tremendously good about himself because a new, healthier, fitter, more vibrant thin man was about to shake off his shackles. Then promptly licked his lips and made himself egg, bacon, sausage and chips and settled down to watch the football. A week later a rowing machine arrived (they must have the wrong address), and it was swiftly dispatched back from whence it came. At this stage another lucky rowing hopeful (moi) stepped into the breach, and after a rather revitalizing bag of chips (my last - obviously) decided to do my own 'Fitness Thaaang' and order it.

Something that doesn't spring to mind when you buy a rower is that you have to put it together yourself. It arrived a few weeks back and was rather like assembling a giant meccano set. Only without any of the benefits of ending up with something exciting like a rocket ship, or a Super Digger Excavator.

Beny V-Fit Artemis Rower

Instead you sweat buckets fiddling with nuts, bolts and chains - this is actually quite good aerobic exercise, so I probably shouldn't complain - and have the continual worry that the first time you sit on the device it is likely to collapse under the strain. In any event, I fiddled with it for about an hour - so much for the 3 and a half seconds assembly time promised on the pack - and ended up with something that broadly approximated the picture above.