Dave O'Neil: Blobs and bikes

Fitness is important, there's no doubt about that. That's why I dusted off my bike for my yearly ride. Sure, some of you might be jumping over tyres while fellow accountants yell at you. Or maybe you're doing a bit of Zumba, Curves or darts.

Hey, whatever gets you out and about, I've always taken the Michelle Bridges approach when it comes to fitness. Find some fat people and yell at them. That's easy for me – I just look in the mirror.

Back to my bike. I was about to start the first leg of my triathlon when I noticed my bike had a flat tyre. Don't worry kids, I said, I was a BMX champion once. OK, so I won a third place trophy in the Croydon amateur league, mainly because there were only three kids in the race. But I can fix a flat tyre. I spent my youth pumping up tubes and submerging them in buckets of water to see those tell-tale bubbles. I used to be the rubber patch king, like a Formula One pit-stop team, I could get a wheel off and fixed in less than five minutes.

You see these days, I told my kids, these sort of tasks are outsourced. Sure, I could take it up to the bike shop and let some gnarly dude who rides mountain bikes off cliffs on the weekend fix my tyre, but that goes against the grain. I grew up in an era when people fixed their own flats, mowed their own lawns and even made their own smoothies.

Believe it or not, you can throw a banana, some milk and yoghurt into a blender and, voila, you've saved yourself $8. No wonder people are getting obese, we're not doing much for ourselves these days. And it's only going to get worse. We're breeding a generation of blobs who will just sit around and have other people do everything for them.

Depending where you fall in the class system, we're breeding blobs and then the blob slaves. One day we will all be like Prince Charles, someone will wake us, dress us, feed us and tell us where to be on any given day. Eventually the blob slaves will rise up and take over, like Planet of the Apes or maybe the computers will take over, or Russell Brand and his revolution. Someone's going to take over. And what will we do? Will we resist in some Hunger Games-style counter-revolution? No, we'll do nothing, because we'll all be the shape of bean bags.

I digress. I got the tyre off and found the hole in the tube. But then my memory got a bit shaky. Did you have to do anything to the tube before you stick the patch on? Do you sand it? And which side of the patch do you stick down? My kids could see I was confused, just look up YouTube, they said. And sure, that's what people do these days. You can guarantee if you want to change a washer, cook a schnitzel or wipe your backside, some guy with an American accent would have recorded a YouTube instructional video. It's a bit sad because I was taught how to do those three aforementioned tasks by my parents. There were plenty of times when I would ring home from my share house and say things like: "Mum how do you cook eggplant?" or "Dad, is there life on Mars?" (he was in the air force).

These days mums and dads have all been replaced by guys called Gerry from YouTube. I was having no part of that. I would Google it instead. So 15 minutes later, after sorting through all the information, I patched my tube and put my tyre back on my bike.

It was OK for about two kilometres, then it started to deflate. Why is the world so against me when it comes to getting fit? Then I thought: "Don't panic, just think, what would Michelle Bridges do?" She wouldn't waste time fixing tyres when there are fat people to yell at. She would outsource this task and concentrate on more pressing issues, like coming up with new ways to say, "feel the burn".

I ended up at the bike shop and the gnarly dude fixed my tyre. I was the blob and he was my blob slave. I paid him, but I asked him to go easy on me when the revolution happens.