Fit To Travel?

With all the physical demands of narrowboat life, David Johns should be like an athlete but there’s the call of canalside cafés.

An occasional but recurring theme of comments put to me about boat life is surely all that constant travelling on the canals must make you fit. All that lock-opening, paddle-winding, coal-lifting and so on?

I’d love to claim that this is so – and perhaps it is in some respects true – but must also confess that, at least in my case, any calorific benefits from said exercise is more than cancelled out by the greater consumption of treats handed to myself as reward for all that hard work; doughnuts and lemon drizzle cake being particular favourites.

What to do about this conundrum, if you can summon the energy to tackle it? One set of suggestions comes from the narrow boat-dweller, circus performer and YouTuber Myles McDowell who posted a video recently about how to keep fit while living on a boat.

His ingenious examples included lifting a full coal scuttle repeatedly to build arm muscle, and pushing yourself up (legs outstretched) on the galley kitchen units.

To this I would add opening and closing the eight locks of the Droitwich Barge Canal which are, without a doubt, the heaviest lock gates I’ve yet encountered. Quite why this should be I have no idea but my, oh my, they are stiff and substantial. It was with great relief then, having gone through the first two such locks after the trip down the Severn from Stourport, that I found space available on the short stretch of visitor moorings lying immediately above and could break my journey for a quick rest and a cake-shaped snack (to be more precise: a cake). I’d been anxious about finding a spot because those moorings are the only place you can stop until you reach Droitwich itself.

The rest of the canal, which runs for six miles or so, has edges that are covered in reeds so voluminous it would take an army of strimmers and a dredger to make any headway into them.