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Maybe I would enjoy exercise more if it combined one of my favourite activities – going to the pub with friends.

The Evil Gym doesn’t have a bar – it does however have a couch where you can have umlimited top-ups of fizzy drinks and read the Daily Mail. Errr - no thanks.

A search of other gyms in the area also failed to yield a bar or at the very least a comfortable environment where I could entertain my friends whilst continuing with my fitness challenge.

The only thing for it was to get out of town and exercise in the open air (so I wear a hat - see above).

On the weekend we drove out of the city in my friend’s convertible. It was fun. I sat in the backseat wearing a puffa jacket backwards and shouting “What? What did you just say?”

The sat nav didn’t work, meaning we spent most the day in a very unlovely part of London where it would not be out of the question if I was stabbed. I compiled the reasons why I may be stabbed: I looked like a wan**er, I was in a Saab convertible, I had lost control of the broadsheets I was nursing and the books’ pages were flying into the cars behind me (“Give me back my Delillo review!” I shouted to a white van man) , we were listening to folk music – and even worse - singing along, I was wearing a puffa jacket backwards, we were going to the country for a walk. I had turned into my parents. Stab me! Stab me now.

But we made it down to Kent unstabbed. We went to the pub first. It was a ye olde find – made for English midgets about 400 years ago. I had a warm beer and a steak and ale pie with gravy. My pals had the same. We passed a happy hour in silence – reading our mangled newspapers and inhaling our pies.

Now for the exercise bit. We had a book of walks. We appointed a navigator. We appointed someone to carry the backpack. I carried a small stick and a mini pinecone.

The walk was 10 miles and it was stunning. It was like being on the treadmill in the Evil Gym but instead there was fresh air, and my friends, and conversations and some really interesting things to look at. Instead of looking at video clips of Beyonce or Britney gyrating on the borders of porn we saw the following things on the walk:
- birds of prey circling a field
- a steam train with a whistle that sounded like a hiss
- trainspotters at intervals along the tracks, some wearing fluorescent vests, others in corduroy
- a sewerage treatment plant
- a red fox with a glistening, healthy coat and its almost Britney-like come-thither stare
- rabbits the same colour as dry grass
- a man walking through the woods in a tuxedo who stopped and said Hello
- a man on a blue plough who didn’t
- half a dozen chicks in the darkened hollow of a tree – their eyes bright in the dark, their mouths huge and chirps that sounded hungry
- a woman playing a harp in an inn we passed along the way
- a large snail without its shell
- a massive bumblebee

It was lovely. What a civilized way to exercise, I thought. Maybe it’s the surprises in nature that makes it feel so not like a chore.

On the way back to the city I thought of the gym I could open for city people who can’t get to the country for walks. I would set them up on a treadmill next to their friends, after everyone had eaten pies and drunk a beer. I would make sure it was only dear friends – not someone you only half-like. I would dapple the lighting to make it look like sunlight coming though the canopy of trees.

Then I would throw things at the treadmill – things that would delight the walkers: a porcupine, a child’s pony, a flower-girl on her way to a wedding, a tuba player, a friendly squirrel, some blujays, bunches of wild flowers and an ancient stag.

And the people on the treadmill would walk for hours and hours hardly aware they were exercising and exclaim to their friends at all the amazing things they had seen.

They would step off the treadmill and go into a room where the ceilings are low and the fires are lit and there is a cheery barman with rosy cheeks – and drinks are drunk, before puffas are put on backwards and everyone goes home and lives happily ever after.

Labels: convertibles, Daily Mail, Kent, walking