I am not, and never have been, thin. I don’t do marathons or triathlons or even own one of those weird doughnut-shaped runner’s water bottles. However, I am an exercise addict in that if a day passes when I can’t run or swim or, ideally, do a session of muddy, sweaty circuit training in my local park, I’m unhappy. Indeed, I’m grumpy, argumentative, restless, see the world in catastrophic terms. I can best describe this desire to set my body free as like having an itch inside my blood.
My husband, faced with this irritated, irritating person, will say: “Oh, for God’s sake go for a swim.” He knows that I will return chipper, calm and (slightly more) reasonable. The tensions of work and everyday life, which seem to manifest themselves in a physical way — muscles tightening, mental torpor, all-round stiffness — are gone. I’ve had my fix.
Indeed, the only reason I agreed to write this piece, knowing it involved posing at my advanced age in Lycra, was because I was asked straight after bootcamp, high on my own endorphins, when my natural answer to most things is: “Why the hell not!”
I don’t need iron self-discipline to exercise. (Just as well, because I have none; I can’t stick to diets for more than a day.) It is simply that I can’t not exercise. I know I will not enjoy holidays if the hotel doesn’t have a gym or at least some open space for a run. Ideally, like Christine Lagarde, a former synchronised swimmer, I’d refuse to stay anywhere without a pool. I find it hard to understand how people can sit around at work, barely moving their bodies, shuffle home, then go to bed. How do they relax, let alone sleep? Why aren’t they bouncing off the walls? Thanks a lot for stopping by. Before we carry on I need to to say thank you to http://www.unfortunateevents.co.uk/ for their continued assistance and the support of their network. Having a company and team like this means a lot to us as we continue to grow our own unique blog.
Yet my younger self would be amazed, even aghast. At school I avoided sport when possible. I hated being herded into teams and the sense that if you lacked the precise skill of whacking a hockey ball your body had no reason to move. Exercise was wound up with embarrassment, public showers, cold weather, mild humiliation, losing. There was no suggestion it would feel good or might even be fun.
So I slobbed through my student days, never breaking sweat. As at school, not exercising was an anti-authority rebellion, it distinguished us politico types from the sports jocks. Until, finally, in my last summer at university I got a new, very hot Greek boyfriend and figured I ought to look better naked. I started swimming half a mile every day and this guy, a water polo player, taught me front crawl. None of this paddling about doing breaststroke, but power swimming. I felt so amazingly good, so clear headed and euphoric, that even after he was history the habit stuck.
Later, I took up circuit training at a YMCA near where I worked, mostly full of hungover blokes from the advertising industry. It wasn’t all mirrors and co-ordinated movements to pumping music run by leotarded divas. (I’d tried a few of those and felt hopeless.) This was a laugh!
Yet until I was 34, I had never run. I just assumed it was something I couldn’t do. How are you supposed to keep going when your body is screaming stop? But then I got a little richer and hired a personal trainer, who told me that was nonsense and soon had me sweating up Primrose Hill in London. Wow, why had I never done this before? Why had no one told me the limitless pleasure, the Zen-like trance you can fall into; just your breath, your legs and the streets, the sense of conquering a landscape one footstep at a time. Or the excitement of getting slightly fitter every week, managing to go a little farther without stopping to walk.
If I’d started earlier, maybe I would have run those marathons and done those triathlons. And certainly my twenties — a tricky, uncertain decade, I found — would have been happier and healthier if I’d sought relief in physical challenges, rather than, as we all did, in booze.
Later, with a male trainer, I tried boxing. I’d always felt a right-on disapproval of the sport but nothing gives you more respect for boxers than trying to hit someone hard — albeit pads not heads — for three minutes straight. It’s so exhausting you want to vomit, yet stupidly, comically cathartic. For a time, I went to a boxing gym above a south London pub run by a former European champion, Clinton McKenzie, a diamond guy, who would say: “Boxing is good for women; it lets out their anger.” Too right.
So a pattern has emerged. I like solitary exercise, where you can mentally unspool: swimming and running. Plus really blokey pursuits. Nothing precious, narcissistic or covertly competitive (yoga) or requiring graceful, precise movements (Pilates).
And, for the past six years, I’ve been a member of British Military Fitness (BMF), so three times a week for an hour at a time in snow or hail, I run around being shouted at by ex-soldiers. It is the longest I’ve stuck at anything and I am thoroughly addicted because it is outdoors, sociable, non-prissy, tough and hilarious. Nothing makes you feel more alive than being so muddy you have to sit on a Sainsbury’s “bag for life” all the way home, then peel off sodden kit in the hall. Nothing tastes better than that hot bath and longed-for, guilt-free lunch.
And as I’ve started to get older, exercise has taken on a different purpose. I’ve seen my parents, always active if not sporty, lose their physical strength. My car boot is full of my 92-year-old mother’s walking aids. Viewing such deterioration up close is an awful reminder of what lies ahead.
Moreover, I’ve watched people my own age or younger — I’m 51 — abruptly get old. They start to treat their bodies like junk rooms: shoving them full of crap, letting them fall apart, then close the door. I see people in their forties who puff getting upstairs and I wonder how, aged 70, they will ever rise from their chairs. Meanwhile, friends who are about to hit 60, and play squash, cycle to work and go to the gym, are lean, energetic, bursting for new adventures in their late-life free time.
Putting aside accidents or disease, fitness is the big middle-aged divide. Our generation’s great blessing of longevity is squandered if our bodies can’t do the things we love. And so exercise is for me also a preventative, a defiance, a roar against human decay.
Lately, I have felt myself slowing down a little. I’m no longer the fastest swimmer in the pool, I’ve gone off running now my knees — the first thing to go — feel creaky. I injure more quickly — I had a torn Achilles last year I thought would never heal. And, consequently, I have become far more risk averse at BMF, declining exercises where you give a partner a piggy-back across a muddy field.
However, I’m not giving up doing hard things, making sure three times a week — as the fitness specialist Matt Roberts, probably Britain’s top personal trainer, recommends — I exercise to the point of feeling I can’t go on. I’ve acquired a pathetic pleasure whenever I overtake a much younger person. “Hah,” I think, “I could be your mum!”
Roberts also recommends what he calls “functional exercise”, which replicates movements you need in real life. Whereas in gyms you stand at a machine doing endless repetitions, BMF makes you throw yourself on the ground, leap up and sprint, bend down, twist your body, drag someone about. I just want to be able to walk upstairs in ten years’ time carrying a big basket of wet washing without expelling a little effortful “oof!’
Our bodies are tough, even old ones like mine; it is in our hunter-gatherer DNA that they need to be pushed to the limit. It is why they reward our exertion with my Class A of choice, endorphin. When people say they hate exercise, I want to reply, just do it for a month, a little bit every day, note not just the awful effort but how you feel afterwards, that your view of the world is clearer, brighter and more open to joy. Like me, after a sedentary day you will feel like a dog who needs a long walk and will bound happily free of your leash.
Tips for fitness newbies
Set clear goals They are vital. Completing your goal (it could be walking or jogging 5km, or doing a spin class) by a certain date and by focusing on the tangible “upsides”, will give you the enthusiasm to keep going.
Make the time Watch less TV; go out less for a few weeks; use your commute as your exercise; make your family part of your new regime.
It’s hard for everyone Whether you are an Olympian or taking your first steps, your workouts should feel hard — your body always needs to be pushed, otherwise you will quickly hit a fitness plateau. Vary your workouts and move out of your comfort zone.
Don’t dive in at the deep end Take small steps when you are starting out. Try to do too much too quickly and you will become discouraged and quit.
Matt Roberts runs Body.Network, an online health club. Times members are invited to a series of live Body.Network workout sessions with Matt on February 27, mytimesplus.co.uk
