Home gym tour

Like many of you, we have spent the past 3 months training a lot indoors. Luckily, exercising outdoors was never banned in Wales however we were limited. For example, cycling was only permitted a “reasonable walking distance” from home.

So, before you knew it we were both signed up to Zwift and the Wahoo KICKR was on order.

Last week, the KICKR arrived as did some cameras from S4C (the Welsh Media) who wanted to come by and film some clips of David in his “pain cave” for the programme “Prynhawn da” which is basically the welsh version of BBC’s “The One Show”. So we decided to spend the bank holiday weekend giving our gym a makeover.

The first thing we needed to do was make room for the KICKR. We also needed somewhere to rest our IPads which we are using for Zwift. On the wattbike we can rest it on the bars but we didn’t think this would be possible on our bikes.

Off I went up to B&M to see what was available. I came back with these drawers which has given us some storage for bits like swim bands, display space for medals and trophies and a place to rest our ipads. We are already considering investing in some sort of screen to put here.

The wattbike was then rotated to face the new drawers and the KICKR placed alongside it. We are looking forward to doing some Zwift workouts side by side here. The fan (essential for indoor bike sessions) slots in perfectly in the corner.

We then decided to move the treadmill to the middle of the room so that we could have a view of the outdoors whilst running. Before now we only had the wall to look at. Thankfully the treadmill also has a little iPad shelf.

We finally used the space which the treadmill left to leave a little area for strength work. David brought down an old ottoman from upstairs and all our weights were placed in here so that they didn’t clutter the floor as they had previously.

Once all of the equipment had been rearranged it was time for the finishing touches. We have a gallery wall of race numbers on our landing but we had run out of space so decided to stick the rest of the numbers on this wall which we will be facing when on the bikes. A couple more medals have been added to the medal stand and frames placed on the new shelves with our trophies.

Finally I blue-tacked a poster from Nice 70.3 World Championships to the wall to join the Ironman Wales frames we have up from when we both did Ironman Wales in 2018.

This leaves only one bare wall. There was a TV here – but it fell off! (Too much bouncing on the treadmill I think). It’s left a few unsightly screws and holes so we definitely need to cover it up at some point. We were thinking maybe mirrors as this is now our “strength” section of the gym and it’ll make the place look bigger too. Or does anyone else have any other suggestions?