Marathon Me

Yesterday our team took a Segway tour around Austin.  It was pretty nerdy, dorky, fun. We met at the Holiday Inn at Lady Bird Town Lake.  We had about 15-20 minutes of instructions on how not to kill each other and than spent about 3 hours going around to some interesting places in downtown Austin.  For the most part we didn’t really care where we went, we just wanted to ride the Segways.  They could have set up an obstacle course in a parking lot and I think we would have had just as much fun.

The segway is pretty easy to use and you get the hang of it really quickly.  The only tricky part was getting on and off by yourself.  Once you are on the device it’s pretty intuitive.  We were on generation two Segways and from what I understand the biggest improvement was around the steering.  The old versions you had to twist the handle bars like reving a motorcycle depending on where you wanted to go.  The ones we rode you just pulled to the right if you wanted to go to the right.  We were all able to do donuts in the parking lot within 2 minutes of riding.

Riding around in your helmet you realize how low on the social plane you really are when on a segway.  You get a lot of puzzled looks (especially when traveling in a pack of greater than 10), but you get more dirty looks.  It seems that cars hate bikes, bikes hate cars, bikes hate runners, runners hate bikers, runners hate cars, but they all hate segways.

I had fun riding it, but I don’t think I need to ever do it again.  I also don’t see what all the fuss was 10 years ago when they came out.  It’s not that exciting, but it was pretty fun.  I can’t imagine paying 5 grand for one though.

The muscles you actually use the most are your feet.  We had two scheduled “feet breaks” where people could get off and stretch out their feet.  It was similar to using the WiiFit, so I may have to renew my battle with Mr. WiiFit after 3 hours of working out my balance and my feet.  Bring it on Mister!

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