. . . on keeping fit
I’VE BEEN HERE many times before. Rummaging through drawers for half-decent “keep fit” gear. Though nobody uses the term “keep fit” any more, do they? “Keep fit” is much too what-it-says-on-the-tin. “Keep fit” screams wet Wednesday evening in a parish hall.
It was all over for "keep fit" around the time line dancing crossed the Atlantic. All of those people keeping trim by doing the grapevine to Achy Breaky Heart. We want our "keep fit" to sound as far away from from actual exercise as possible. Now it's all hip hop and hot yoga and tag rugby and this thing called Zumba people keep emailing me about. Zumba is the new "keep fit", apparently. Do keep up.
Not wanting to be narrow-minded and Zumbaphobic, I took a look at the website. Apparently, the fitness craze known as Zumba combines “hypnotic latin music with exciting dance moves”. The video shows a room full of people jiggling their bottoms and doing air guitar to “world beats”, whatever they are. It’s the kind of thing I could just about countenance after a bottle of wine, on my own, in my bedroom if an early Wham! song came on the radio.
But keeping fit is just not worth that kind of public humiliation. If I was possessed of a bottom I didn’t mind jiggling in front of other people, then I wouldn’t need to keep fit, is my basic argument against Zumba (which I am sure is fantastic but it just looks a bit too high-octane for me).
I needed to do something though. And if not Zumba, then what? It had to be free. It had to be easy. It had to be private. I know it’s perfectly normal to want to do all these moving-about shenanigans in front of other people but I am a very solitary keep-fitter. I don’t want to be seen exercising and I don’t particularly want to look at other people exercising, which cuts out gyms, team sports and any big running events.
After some consideration, I decide to start jogging. Again. Every second person I meet is doing half marathons and marathons and hillwalking and triathlons. It kind of gets in on a person.
So jogging it is, but not in preparation for any actual event and early enough in the morning to avoid other people. I am allergic to mass gathering running. In my experience, surrounded by joggers and loud motivating music, no matter how seriously I’ve trained, I fall apart and forget how to walk – never mind run.
The last time I did any proper moving about was several years ago while in training for the mini marathon. I employed the (free) services of an understanding running partner, because the loneliness of the short distance jogger/walker threatened to scupper me before I even began.
I was using a training schedule designed to get the chronically unfit from the sofa to five kilometres of continuous running. My jogging mate trotted beside me with the stopwatch on his mobile phone, letting me know when my one minute of jogging was up and when my one-and-a-half minutes of walking should commence.
It was a fraught relationship. I needed a lot of encouragement, but sometimes he would forget to tell me there were only 20 seconds of running left and then, if he did remember, the tone of his voice wasn’t motivating or interested enough. Eventually – I think, just after I told him he needed to sound friendly but firm in his comments – he resigned. And I hung up my running shoes.
I dug them out again recently. Them and the ill-fitting tracksuit bottoms and orange T-shirt that came free with something.
I’d been feeling it for a while. Low-level sad, batteries run down. My body had started giving me lectures. It was saying: “I know you don’t like exercise and you feel you’ve let things slide so much that what is the point, but the thing, is I’m a body and I was built to move so could you please do something?” I tried retorting that, at least I was back on the bike, but my body sent me to Coventry and so I knew I had to do something else. My running partner wasn’t available. That is, he looked at me, laughed and said: “Never again.”
But it turns out that, as is so often the case in life, there is an app for that. This one is called Get Running. The voice in my ear is friendly but firm. She is English. She says, “Well done, you are half way through today’s session” and, “After this run you have only two minutes of running left.” She has a smile in her voice. She reminds me to do stretches at the end of each session. She tells me to rest for a day and come back tomorrow. And so far, I keep on coming back. I keep on running.