Pressing on with the New Year’s Resolutions, then, with this latest writing project being one of them. I have also been baking loaves of bread (one awful, one excellent, and one a bit weird and twisted (which I had toasted this morning – it tasted alright, but you wouldn’t take it home to Mother)), plus giving a bit to charity, and I will soon begin a growing fruit and veg project in the grounds with SWK.
A regular feature of the ‘what I should probably try to do this year’ list, is running, or, perhaps more accurately, exercising for a certain number of miles on foot, recorded assiduously on RunKeeper on my ‘phone, since I first started on 13th February 2013. We have just passed eight years into this unexpected phase of my life, and the grand total is now 4,311 miles (as I type). Therefore, I am turning out about 530 or so miles per year, on average. This is not much, compared to what some people do, but I lack the dedication, time, or interest to lope along for 16 miles on a Sunday morning, when frankly 3, 4 or 5 miles suits me quite nicely, backed-up by marching along with one or both dogs as well. The running part is all on the treadmill in the garage, at the moment, because, in truth, I generally feel pretty self-conscious when out and about exercising. I can walk a dog with a certain amount of middle-aged dignity – no problems there. Nevertheless, to my shame, I always feel like I look a complete sight when running outdoors, and somehow a bit deficient, in comparison with others who always look smooth, composed, lean and neat. However, I plan to break through this self-imposed wall, later in the year, now that we have some nice countryside available, and a less abusive public to contend with, compared to where we used to live.
All of this is, being an activity undertaken for only 8 of the last 47 years, is really quite new, still. And it didn’t always used to be this way..
My favourite book is Earthly Powers, by the late, great, Anthony Burgess; an old-School polymath, whose career went far too overlooked. If you should ever feel there is a 678-page hole in your life, that you would like to fill with a parodical saga and memoir that deals with a writer’s battle with the Church, his art and his homosexuality, set against a backdrop of the major events of the first 80 years of the 20th Century – then this one’s for you. Beware, though, it’s a chewy bugger, as novels go. I adore it, but have only managed to read it all the way through on three occasions in the 25 years since I first became aware of it.
It begins with an extraordinarily provocative sentence:
“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”
The hero of the tale, which starts near the end, is one Kenneth Marchal Toomey. He is living in Malta, with his thoroughly unpleasant ‘catamite’, in the form of Geoffrey Enright – a man in his late 30’s, who bullies his impotent lover, Toomey, both physically and verbally, mostly out of jealousy for the older man’s talents and connections. He (Enright) is a drunken, cowardly and insidious liability, and, as Toomey puts it “fast running to fat – although Geoffrey never ran.”
That was the expression that came to me this morning when I decided to start working on this piece. I never ran. Ever. In addition, I have always struggled a bit with my weight. Somewhat. However, this isn’t about to become a misery memoir chapter entitled ‘On Being Given to Portliness’ – let’s take it as read that there have been periods of my life, so far, when I have inclined more to the spherical, and have never been pleased about it. At the moment, on the cusp of my late forties, I am somewhere between circular and oblong, and trying to move towards the latter.
Why? Lack of exercise, too much booze, and an irregular diet. Nothing unusual. I don’t have some malfunctioning gland at which I can point an accusatory finger. The state of me is the state of a lot of people, physically speaking. We are bombarded, now, by tales of the obesity epidemic. Folk are characterised as sat at home, getting outside of sandwiches composed of salt, sugar and fat, watching box-sets, and waiting for Dominos to open their doors for an evening delivery. Of course, there will be more than a single grain of truth in that. Enough evidence shows us that people are just getting bigger – and particularly in the ‘First World’. However, I am given to wonder about the efforts people make to counteract their worst and most slothful instincts. The lockdown in its various forms has seen quite a lot of focus given to our daily quotient of exercise – partly as an expression of their freedom to leave their home, and to avoid going mad and slaughtering their loved ones. I see a lot of people out and about jogging. Many others begin their day puffing along to that Wicks chap, in a superannuated PE class, and if adverts are anything to go by, the purchase of a Peloton bike and subscription will soon be mandatory for anyone with a BMI of over 25.
Just bung a question into Google, and see what comes back. The ukactive survey indicates that the ‘average’ person questioned does 90 minutes of moderate physical activity every week, but that more than 25% of us in the UK do less than 30. Other sources indicate that as many as 37% of us play no sport and do no exercise. Crikey – that’s a lot of people, right?
I do wonder a bit about this, though. Surely you don’t have to be flying down the wing and scoring tries every Saturday, do you? Lots of things must count that don’t get counted. Exercise is not always something we do for fun – we often do it by dint of our work. Carrying bricks on a building site must, to give lazy and obvious example, set up quite a calorific deficit. Even walking from the train station to the office knocks off some of the edges. We might, as a nation, be one of the slower coaches of the world, but we’re not all waddling around like this bloke:
So, boringly, it’s clearly a balance. If you are an enthusiast for the good works of the pie industry, then it’s true, as it has always been true, that you need to move around a bit more if you don’t want to attract your own satellites. I’m not trying to educate anyone here, by the way. Whilst I did once pull off a reasonably spectacular personal feat of downsizing (which I will talk about later), I am just like everyone else, and I need a periodic kick up the arse that is either administered by the sensible bit of my brain, or through a tearful engagement with the button of my waistband. However, perhaps it is helpful to state the obvious, now and again? Don’t know.
Why, then, could I never see this?
I have reached some conclusions, but they are only my conclusions, rather than general ones:
I have asthma.
It was diagnosed for the first time when I was about seven or eight, I think. I had an old school, red and white, Allen and Hanburys Intal Inhaler, and was just sort of conscious of it forever more. I still am, but these days treatments are so much more effective that it occupies only the tiniest little office in the back of my mind. I can do some running and not need it. For years and years and years, however, I would worry about where my device was, and, faced with doing something strenuous would imagine I was going to have an asthma ‘attack’ and be rendered embarrassed, immobile, and, just possibly, dead.
I hated exercise at School.
I mean, I hated School full-stop, really, as I didn’t like the School I went to, once I was 11. It was an all-boys Grammar School, and competitive, aggressive and nasty. Weakness, in physical and mental form, was met with derision and bullying. Understanding of differences between us were thin on the ground. Differentiation was just a difficult word to spell. In the colder months, I would labour through games of hockey and rugby and be breathless and unhappy. The only counterweight to any of this came in the Summer months, when we played cricket. It was more my kind of pace, and I was, by any estimate, a good fast medium swing bowler. I took loads of wickets, and gained some popularity for it. Being quite blockish, I harnessed some of that beef and hit a few sixes. I carried on playing as an undergraduate, and even on into my mid-twenties, but then gave up. I regret that, now. All of the positives gained were spoiled, though, by the requirement to occasionally run all the way around the School fields on colder and wetter days. I would invariably finish last or nearly last, and even being in that group of slow performers didn’t have any camaraderie to it. We were just slow, wheezy, fat and miserable, and would get ‘teased’ (beaten up) for being so. Lovely. I don’t miss being a teenager.
I took up smoking.
And for this, I will always be an idiot. I gave up about eight years ago, and won’ t be going back for a moment. However, from the first moment the teenage me wilfully picked a cigarette up (and loved it first time) to the last one I ground out in an ashtray in Oslo? Stupid, stupid stupid. Aside from the cost, the stink, and the sheer foolishness of it, of course it served for more than two decades to interact with my asthma and made me incapable of exercising properly, even if I wanted to. I smoked because I sort of wanted to, I guess. I thought it was adding something. I was deluded by addiction, and insulted my own intelligence. Still, that’s long over now.
I thought I knew best.
In many ways, actually, this was probably the worst contributory factor. I sat there, with my glass of beer and my fag, watching and studying sport, and playing cricket now and again. I would openly scoff when friends informed me that exercise was the way to be less fat, and more cheerful and energetic. I just wasn’t having it, I’m afraid. Like a lot of people, I assumed that life had a magic bullet that I was just waiting to find. The reality of the situation is, of course, that it’s a case of building yourself and your life from a million little pebbles. Oh well – I suppose with age comes at least a bit of wisdom, although I suspect I am behind the curve on that front, too. I really do regret not having made greater use of my body when it was earlier still earlier in its initial guarantee period. I did do some useful stuff in my twenties, like sorting out a career I could handle, and some affordable lodgings (as per my other recent post). However, I look back now and again and think I might have been more effective had I only just knocked myself into shape whilst I was still on the youthful side of the register. Life carries with it that nagging worry that one too many curries, cigs and pints having gone down, which then, one day, will come back to bite me. I have the recurring daydream (no, not daydream, more of a waking nightmare) of cheerily retiring one day, and checking out courtesy of a massive heart attack the next day, as payment for all past sins.
Still hopefully not, eh?
For all that evidence of genetic illness, stubbornness, stupidity and bad habits ingrained, I did, at last, have a Road to Damascus moment, in the Summer of 2012. It was to lead to me gaining an excellent bill of health when I had my first post-40 MOT, about 18 months later. A lot of good habits have stuck, and one very important one, that I will deal with another time, has come back to me. Running, and the route to running, has remained a constant, in a lot of different ways.
So in early July 2012, waking with a headache after Andy Murray had lost the Wimbledon final, I poured away (in disgust) all the booze in the house, drank only water, tea and coffee for a year, ate only low carb food, and six months into that year took up exercise and dropped the fags. I lost a grand total of 101lb in that period, and by the end of it was in the shape of my life. Everything, and I mean everything, turned around for me in that period of my life. The lifestyle thing and the exercise bit of it in particular, was entirely behind this.
By March 2013, I was waking up fresh as a daisy at 6.00am on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and walking five miles before so much as the thought of a coffee or some breakfast. I had reasoned that extra exertion would add to the reduction of the flesh. I would arrive home, make eggs and bacon, smoke a cigarette or two (dear, sweet, foolish younger me) and drink my coffee, safe in the knowledge I had already taken 650-odd calories out of the day. I already felt amazing, and I hadn’t even started running, yet. My feet hurt, because, me being me, I was doing all of this in a Winter coat and smart shoes. Over time, I graduated to gardening trainers, then cheap new trainers, and eventually to running shoes. I bought a pair of shell-suit tracksuit bottoms for £3 and a t-shirt for £2, washed them constantly and wore them out completely. Every few weeks I jettisoned older bits of my wardrobe to the charity shops, and bought cheap, temporary replacements as I gradually ‘disappeared’ into a narrower and narrower shadow of my former self.
As I look back on it, 4,000-odd miles later, I realise there was a certain inevitability to the change of pace that occurred. I was wearing fewer clothes, as the weather warmed. As I always do, when I am on my own (it’s less safe with a dog), I was listen to enervating and energising music. I was walking so quickly I was almost running. Almost. There lingered in my mind those words, however: “Geoffrey never ran”. I wasn’t going to. I couldn’t, could I? I had said so on Facebook. I would surely expire and have to be revived at the roadside if I did. The past loomed over me, and shook its head, slowly.
But then, one chill dawn in April 2013, with no one to see me but the birds and the squirrels, I jogged 50 yards. Then I walked 200 yards. Then I jogged another 70. And so on and so on it went. My lungs forgot to burn, my heart ticked merrily. My arse and my legs and my back all expressed a bit of surprise, but did not complain or threaten any sort of strike. I could sort of do it, a bit. I coined the term ‘ralking’, as a concatenation or compounding (or something like that – bear with me, I’m having a joyful reverie here), of running and walking. It just improved, and improved, and so did I. I crested hills, music bursting in my ears, and then WHOOSH – as I ran down them.
After a while, I was almost betting with myself. Could I, or would I, run to the next bus stop, or parked car? Could I continue to run until I heard the next ‘five minute’ update on RunKeeper? Could I run through two such announcements? It was utterly, insanely infectious and alien and wonderful. On some mornings, and this does me little credit, but I’m not sure I care too much, I would espy unthreatening-looking early risers on the horizon, and set about catching and overtaking them. Yes, unwitting souls were pacemaking for me, and racing me. I was, perhaps, a little unhinged for a while there, but really only in a good way.
In the late Spring and early Summer, I ran ‘round Statue Park in Oslo, and up the side (not quite literally) of the Aqueduto das Águas Livres in Lisbon. It was 85 degrees, I was sweating cobs, and it was bloody awesome.
Periods of running were knitting together, and I was running more than walking. I can still picture the moment when I realised I had run a whole mile, non-stop, and easily. I had never, ever, done that before in my life.
I went on and ran 2, 3, 4 and then 5 miles consecutively. I ran 10k in 80, 70, 60, and finally 55 minutes. I did a ParkRun. Me! I ran two or three 5k charity events, with other people, and was not (to my face at least) laughed at. I raised money – I talked to other people about running and read articles about it.
Sidebar: God love me, I still can’t make myself love running with other people. When properly fit, at least back then, I could run 8-9 minute miles, which is perfectly respectable. I know that logically – and I was honestly doing it with my clothes on – I wasn’t Goose-stepping with toilet roll trailing from the crack of my bum, or anything – but for the life of me I can’t ‘fit’ into that mode. It doesn’t matter, of course – not a bit – and it would be impossible to shed all of life’s insecurities. If it suits you, then it suits you. Who knows, I might try it again one day. I counsel myself that I am outgoing in a range of other ways, and that’s fine.
The new me went internet dating. A girl became a girlfriend, for a while a mistress (that was kind of cool, as I was still legally married to Sarah The First), then a live-in-lover, then a fiancée and now the wife that she still is, thank goodness. She’s in the other room just now, as I grin and type, oblivious to all this re-telling.
On and on I ran. Fit as I wanted to be. Life in good balance, with a decent amount of weight staying off.
Then work went wrong. It was best for me to leave my job. We were okay for money, and within 18 months I was Cox Of Arabia (as has been detailed on here before) and marching up and down the Corniche in the blazing Sun, and hammering away nightly in the gym, sprinting my way back towards 10 minute miles.
But, but. Those 18 months cost me so much of what I had gained, I’m afraid. I wanted to do everything I had been doing, but I had been cast into an existence without direction or base. No rhythm to the days or the weeks or the months. Insufficient reasons to enjoy anything. Too many reasons to go still, and to eat, drink and be unhappy. Sad faces all ‘round, for quite a long time, and even with the various bits of rebuilding that have followed, and adventures that went with them, there remains much to do, to regain that old ground.
However, I somehow know that I will. One is always unsure about things, particularly right now, but this is one that’s not going away. It’s built in, and it’s free at the point of use.
It is still a good feeling, even if just hobbling along slower than I used to. The heartbeat still slows afterwards, the endorphins flood into the gap, and the bad mood lightens – none of this stuff leaves you – you cannot use it up. It’s a case of re-learning those earlier lessons about patience, and Rome not being built in a day. Every forward step not being a backward one. Expressing to yourself the same positive messages as to the benefits of running (or any exercise, really) that you would to other people, in seeking to encourage them forward, and to their own heights, and goals. One’s expected lifespan is quite long. One day, with age, I guess walking may take over, as bones go more brittle and there is no floodtide of energy to draw upon any more, but I think what I can show is that it is never too late to make a change. I was THIRTY-NINE. Still young, but not all that young.
We don’t lose anything by changing, and indeed we only stand to gain by doing so. And you can revisit lessons that life teaches you, and learn the language of them all afresh. Find new things in them. Pull on trainers and soak up every fresh yard, and every swing of the leg. Every beautiful chord on your headphones, as you duck under another minute off your old time. There is something out there for all of us – even me, it turned out.
So yes, Geoffrey never ran. But I do. And I am off to do some more of it now.
Next essay/think piece/reminiscence will need a little bit more thought, but it was always one I promised myself I would write about, one day, and so now I will. Next time? A journey towards, through, and beyond, drinking alcohol. Laughter, tears and a lot of love.
Stay safe – back next month.
suggzy 