So what was Tony Abbott thinking about during last week’s ironman triathlon? Thanks to the Waratah Veterans Cycling Club, that mystery has  been solved — and Nicola Roxon was right. “Abs” Abbott has recently written for their newsletter, saying that “that exercise of this magnitude is not conducive to problem solving. I wasn’t consciously thinking of anything like health policy during the day. It’s more simple things you think about, your family, friends who have done this kind of thing. That’s the sort of thing you think about.”

Today, as he embarks on a 1000-kilometre, nine-day ride from Melbourne to Sydney, it’s clear that Abbott has become obsessed with cycling, and now views his bike in the same way Easy Rider’s Peter Fonda did his Harley, as a way of slipping the bonds of normal life. (cue Born to be Wild …)

“Jump on a bike and not only can you flaunt your social conscience but you set the destination and the timetable. The bike is a freedom machine for people who’d rather not pay for petrol and like being fitter than their contemporaries. The disdain motorists express for cyclists is secret envy.”

It’s not surprising that the Iron Monk has become a cyclist, because it suits his religious views.  At one level, devout Catholicism includes a great deal of deprivation and self-denial. According to the Catholic encyclopedia, “very holy people use mortifications to train their souls to virtuous and holy living … Many of these take the form of painful exercise and privations self-inflicted because they are painful”.

For Abbott, getting up at 5am and pushing his body almost to breaking point can be a training ride and a mortification, and is probably more socially acceptable than self-flagellation.

Lots of cyclists of a certain age become body-obsessed, because once your fitness declines, the only way to get faster is to lose weight — from you and the bike.  First you buy a titanium frame you can lift with one finger, and then you develop weird eating habits; Lance Armstrong weighs his food before he eats it.  Abbott used to have a classic, top-heavy ex-footballers physique but these days he looks as if his skin has been shrink-wrapped around his bones.

Friends of his from university days say that he is at least 10 kilograms lighter than he was a decade ago. It’s hard to look at that bare torso and not think of Saint Sebastian and the arrows …

At the launch of his book, Battlelines, I asked him whether he waxed or shaved his legs. (Cyclists say it’s to help with the grazes, but the rest of us think otherwise…)

“Neither,” he exclaimed, adding that on joining his current cycling bunch, his hairy limbs had been noted. “Look!” one of them had told the group, “he’s a virgin.”