A Cycling-Free Holiday

A cycling-free holiday sends the Doc straight to the gym to drown in a tidal wave of sweat

There are three sorts of holiday. There is the cycling holiday. There is the sort of holiday which isn’t a cycling holiday, but where you can nonetheless take a bike and find an hour or two each day or so to go for a ride. And there is the sort of holiday where fitting in some cycling is really, really difficult.

I went on holiday recently. It was on a boat. This is very much a ‘type-three’ holiday, and in general such trips should be avoided. The last time I took a bike on a boating trip, I unpacked it, assembled it, and then discovered that in its completed form it was too big to go back out through the cabin door.

This time I didn’t even try to take a bike. I limited myself to complaining, quite loudly and quite a lot, about how unfit I was getting — there is nothing that will produce an upswing in form like an impending enforced break from training, and nothing that will kill it faster than enforced relaxation and fun.