“I’m a middle-aged man in Lycra,” laughs Colin Leadbeatter. At 39, he’s hardly middle aged, but he certainly owns a lot of Lycra. “I used to spend a lot of time whizzing around London, getting beeped at by angry road users on my bike.”
Since the Covid pandemic, Leadbeatter’s job as a local government planning officer at a north-west London authority has allowed him to work from home four days a week, so now he and his dog Bruce live in Rye, East Sussex, with his partner. They love being near the sea, and the house came with an added benefit. “My other half always wanted a home gym,” he says. “And the new house came with an outbuilding that had previously been used as an office. We got a Peloton Bike+, which came into its own during the lockdowns when we were both living and working together. Having a gym in a little separate building meant we could get out from under each other’s feet.”
As an avid cyclist, you might expect Leadbeatter to be against the idea of a stationary bike. After all, his passion had been peddling through the open air, with the wind in his face. “People often say that,” he says, “but cycling outside and being on the Peloton are very different things. First of all, it’s really useful for when it’s raining or very windy and, since we’re down by the coast, that’s quite a lot of the time. The Peloton lets you train in a similar way, but you’re making strides towards your fitness goals, and you can see your progress.
“I’m a tech geek, so I love how it gamifies exercise,” he says. “You’re immersed in it, so you lose track of time. When I finish a 30-minute class, I always think, that felt like 10 minutes.”
While many people love Peloton’s extensive choice (with a schedule of live classes and more than 25,000 on-demand classes), Leadbeatter is a creature of habit: “I really like certain instructors so just rotate through them,” he says. He also tends to avoid live classes, explaining: “The thing that appeals to me is that you don’t have to go to the 6am or 9am class, you can just jump on it at 8:37am, if that’s more convenient. And after work, you can literally close your laptop and be in a class.”
The curated music is another selling point. “My partner and I have different music tastes, so I like listening to EDM when I’m working out, while he is more into pop. Having said that,” he laughs, “we both like Cody Rigsby, who plays lots of boybands and 1990s pop. He’s hilarious and those classes are pure escapism.”
Investing in a Peloton during the stage of the pandemic when all the gyms were closed was not unusual. But what happened to Leadbeatter next is quite extraordinary. In February 2022, he went out in a small aircraft with a pilot friend, over the South Downs.
“We lost our engine at 3,000ft and had to crash land on the side of a hill,” he says. “I ended up with a broken sternum, a couple of broken ribs and a skull that was fractured in two places, including a basal skull fracture. But the worst thing was two badly fractured vertebrae in my lower and middle spine. I was in hospital for 10 days and then, for three months after that, I was in a front-and-back clamshell brace. My friend’s injuries were even more severe, but luckily he’s recovering well.”
It was difficult for a person who is usually so active to suddenly be constrained. Once the back brace was off, the doctors said he could start cycling again, when he felt up to it. But his body had other ideas. “I hadn’t been supporting my own core for over three months, because of the back brace,” he says. “My core muscles had atrophied to a point where balancing on a road bike was actually very tricky. And obviously you don’t want to be falling over when you’ve got a relatively delicate spine that’s still healing. So the Peloton was almost like training wheels, while I built up my core strength again.”
One of the unlikely benefits of Peloton, which would never have crossed Leadbeatter’s mind before, is that it’s an extremely safe and controlled environment in which to build your strength back up after an injury. “In the armoury of tools available to me as somebody recovering from a serious bit of trauma, it was definitely important,” he says. “The Bike+ has automatic resistance tracking, so I could set that very low and build it up slowly, until I felt strong enough to start really working out again. That process took months, and I’m only really coming out the other side of that now.” Leadbeatter and his partner could never have foreseen the ways in which their Peloton Bike+ would have improved their lives.
“Had it not been for the Peloton,” he says now, “it would certainly have delayed my recovery. I’m really grateful for it.”
Into the zone
With thousands of classes to suit all moods, goals, tastes and experience levels, Peloton lets you ride, run, lift, and flow from the comfort of your own home, or wherever you choose to work out. To find new ways to move – and a community that inspires you to conquer more – head to onepeloton.co.uk. Or click here to download the Peloton App and start a free trial*
*T&Cs: New App Members only. £12.99/mo after trial unless cancelled. Cancel anytime before free trial ends. Full terms at onepeloton.co.uk/app
