Every year I swear that this will be the year I do something adventurous and new at least once a month. Well, that’s not happening this year. It’s April 27th when this post is published but it’s March 29th when I’m writing it. Are we still in lockdown? Probably.
However, last year I did make an effort to have a few adventures and in March, I finally went and had a go on a Segway, after years of wanting to and not bothering to sort it.
I was nervous, I’ll admit. I’m always the person at the back of the group when it comes to moving things, afraid of rolling the snowmobile, being thrown off the dogsled and falling over the snowshoes. And as soon as I stepped on my Segway, I knew I was right to be nervous, even with an instructor holding the thing still.
Segways are not intuitive vehicles. It doesn’t feel natural to lean forward to go, not when you’re standing on two wheels and a pole. It takes a huge amount of energy to teach your brain that the whole contraption isn’t actually going to make you fall flat on your face. What feels even more unnatural is that you don’t actually lean, you just apply pressure with the front of your foot. In hindsight, it’s not entirely unlike riding a snowboard – something else I’m too scared to be able to do properly.
As it turned out, the Segway is slightly less scary when the instructor isn’t holding onto it. On my own, I found it was responding to me, not the hand on its crossbar. I felt a bit more in control, which is a bit less terrifying. They had a tiny circuit to practise on so I suddenly found myself learning to go up and down hills and steer a small tight circle while not crashing into the person in front of me.
Best of all – I wasn’t the worst at it! One girl just couldn’t control hers at all. I don’t know how much fear was causing her trouble and how much was not being able to understand how you control it pretty much exclusively with your feet but being not the worst by a long way felt really good. I’m always the one who’s worst at things!
Now most of us could do it, we headed into the forest. These aren’t the sleek light Segways people like Obadiah Stane from the original Iron Man movie use to zoom around their corporate empires. These were forest Segways, with big chunky tyres and leaf-patterning, quite capable of bouncing over gravel paths and the occasional tree root. Once we were out of sight of the base cabin, our instructor came round switching off tortoise mode. Yes, that was the actual symbol on the screen of the wireless keys we were all wearing round our necks. We’d learnt on the slow setting and now the Segways were free to go as fast as we were physically able to ride them.
It helped to have a slow and scared person in the group. We spent a lot of time waiting at forest path junctions for her and the second instructor, which meant we had plenty of time to practise stopping, standing more or less still, and close-up manoeuvres – we had to all get over to the side to let some bikes pass and the moment I did a wobbly spin-on-the-spot so I could see everything was probably the moment I started to feel really comfortable.
After a while, you get used to that unnatural movement. After a while, it seems to respond to your will, rather than the shift of weight on your feet. How do you open and close your fist? You just do. How do you stop the Segway? You just do. I began to feel like I’d been very wrong – Segways are utterly intuitive, once you’ve reprogrammed your brain to realise it.
We took relatively steep hills, we dodged walkers and cyclists and tree roots and uneven paths. I was in the middle of the group and although there was a gap between me and the person in front of me, I was reasonably sure there was a bigger gap behind me. It’s hard to be certain because I’m not good enough at Segwaying to zoom while looking backwards over my shoulder without falling off. I know that one thing that slowed me down hugely was any obstacle in our path, eg walkers. You slow down for them but I couldn’t help slowing down for them the moment they appeared on the horizon, which meant I had often lost so much speed by the time I reached them that I ended up accelerating past them.
We stopped at the halfway point and parked the Segways against a small bank so they couldn’t trundle away on their own, which they tend to do. This was a photo stop! I’d tried taking selfies at the practise circuit but it’s impossible to get the whole Segway in. I’m not exactly Mr Tickle. We took it in turn to pose while the instructor took the photos and when it wasn’t my turn, I hopped around the clearing trying to sort my legs out. Segwaying is very uncomfortable on your knees, ankles and feet and I had cramp in all three.
The trip back was when it all went wrong. Our slowest member was getting slower, although we didn’t realise how slow until we stopped five minutes in and and discovered that she, her boyfriend and our second instructor were so far behind us that they were utterly out of sight. We didn’t think that was physically possible, given the shape of the path and the curvature of the Earth but after we’d stood on the spot for five or ten or even fifteen minutes, they still hadn’t caught up. It was during this point that I discovered I can actually shift my weight on my feet to lessen the pain in my knees without sending the Segway crazy.
The trouble with having two participants and one instructor separated from the main group is that the remaining instructor has her ratios all ruined. Two groups were going to happen whether anyone liked it or not and all our instructor could do was split her big group more evenly. I fell into the “fast group” by accident. I’ve never been in the fast group before but this time I was glad I had because it would have been endlessly frustrating to zoom so slowly through the forest. I’m also not entirely sure my aching legs could have lasted for that long.
Ok, so I was at the back of the fast group. Surprise surprise. I lost time every time someone appeared on the path and it’s impossible to make it up. Segways have a top speed and if you try to exceed it, it’ll start pushing back in an attempt to throw you off the back. The trouble is, when it starts pushing you backwards, you automatically react by leaning forwards to fight it and the more you lean forward the more it pushes back. You have to really let go of that little thing in your brain and lean your weight back to slow down. Which means I literally can’t catch up while everyone’s going flat-out. Luckily, people mostly slowed down a bit in the corners which gave me a chance to at least not lose sight of them. No, I never slipped quite that far behind.
Before I left, I’d told my mum the session started at 11:40 and that I’d fall off at 11:42, in answer to her asking the question. I didn’t really expect to fall off within two minutes but I was still pretty pleased not to have fallen off at all. I remember when Segways were new and their thing was “impossible to fall off!” before various unpleasant people were thrown off to gleeful headlines. Maybe they just went too fast and refused to back off the speed.
The rest of the day was passed pleasantly. I had a ride on the miniature steam train – it’s so miniature that the carriages are made of leather-padded benches that you sit astride and the majority of passengers are parents with small children. I used to be one of those small children. Afterwards, I walked around the forest. They have a tree top trail – when I was that small child, I thought it was ever so long and ever so high and… it’s not. It’s probably 50-100m long and no higher than maybe ten feet. It’s nice to get up among the trees, though, even if a couple of decades of children running up and down it yelling have sent local wildlife to a different part of the forest.
It’s spring all over again and now I’m thinking I’d like to have another go on the Segway. Well, that’ll have to wait until we’re released. So much to do when the world returns to normal.