What has fitness got to do with your company car? Pumping! One’s pumping iron and the other involves pumping air. At least it does when you’ve got a flat. And that’s exactly what happened to me when I was on the way to run this week’s Pump class.

As you know, I’m a bit obsessed with punctuality, which you’ll know if you’ve ever arrived late to one of my classes. That’s something that immediately flooded back into my mind on the side of the road in rapidly dying light. It’s tough to walk into a room after the scheduled start time when only a week ago you’ve pulled someone else up for their time keeping!

Fortunately, I’m quite disciplined in my preparations with vehicle maintenance as well as keeping in shape, and had a tyre inflator in the boot ready for just this eventuality.

A few years back I found myself stuck in the middle of nowhere with hit and miss mobile signal and a soft tyre. Normally I’d just grab the spare out of the boot and swap it over, but I couldn’t loosen the wheel nuts on the wheel so the spare was no use whatsoever.

I learned a couple of things that day – once I’d eventually managed to hold signal long enough to summon the nearest breakdown patrol van.

Firstly, I didn’t know that you can email a request for assistance from your smartphone. If you need the details, call your breakdown company today – it’s no use waiting until you’ve broken down and realising you should have done so before (like me). If it’s something your policy offers, you can draft the email and your phone will send it quickly when it finds even the faintest signal. No need to keep losing the call before you even get to a human as you navigate the ‘Press 1 to speak to someone useful’ menu.

The second thing I learned that the tyre inflator I mentioned earlier would have saved me, and also saved the patrol man from one job that day. A tyre inflator does exactly what it sounds like it should do – pumps air into your tyres when they’re soft (or even flat). Of course, if I’d known this back then, I still may not have bought one, but having felt the pain of being stranded, it suddenly seemed like a very sensible investment. And so it was.

That fairly cheap purchase meant I made the class this week with a few minutes to spare, and saved me the embarrassment of admitting I’m not perfect (of course I am).

So, the moral of this story is to so your preparation ahead of time and don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today. That’s especially true when it’s something to do with safety. If you’re wanting to follow my lead, take a look at cartyreinflator.co.uk for inspiration and to find out more.

We know that it’s your fitness class that you’d be most appalled to be late for, but if you think about it, it could be other less important things too. Just imagine being late for work, missing out on meeting the future in-laws or hospital appointments. Granted, its the weekly pump class that you must be on time for, but other people might appreciate punctuality too. We all rely on our cars so much, that we sometimes forget that they break down from time to time too, so having a simple thing like a portable digital car tyre inflator on board can make all the difference.