I miss living in Ireland for a new reason every week. With one of the most pressing being that I could exist there without feeling the compulsion to “get fit”. I miss being able to fix my body image issues with a flattering jumper. I took for granted how happy I was slowly turning myself into the bodily consistency of blancmange.
Now I live in a country that lives in a semi-permanent state of undress for the summer, which goes on for nine months of the year.
It was a shock to the system when I got back to Australia – seeing this many collarbones and armpits out in public. Like a nation of perverts. But when average temperatures hit 30 degrees in the warmer months it’s expected. You have to keep cool to survive and that means wearing as few layers as possible. But it also leaves you nowhere to hide.
Sydney is and has always been a vain city. It is LA-like in its obsession with appearances, pressing on its people to stay slim but retain muscles, and to be brown but to have skin undamaged by the sun. The gyms are packed. The footpaths are overtaken by run clubs. People have “going out” sets of active wear and actual active wear that they don’t mind sweating in. Everything in the supermarket now has protein in it. Even in places it doesn’t belong – cheesecake, chocolate milk.
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Not even plain pasta is safe. I cannot enjoy a simple carbohydrate without the threat of “hitting my macros”. Once an acquaintance told me he was tired because he was in a “cal def”. I thought it was some sort of community musical theatre programme doing a show I’d never heard of, but he was talking about being in a “calorie deficit”.
There’s now slang for that. Call the vet. Put me down.
But they finally got to me. I cracked just short of a year in. I broke my wrist at the start of the year, which severely impacted my tight fitness regime of playing social netball and going to the occasional Pilates class to avoid the cancellation fee. I was in a cast for 12 weeks and while the bone healed, there is still a tiny chip of it floating about causing all sorts of problems. Long story short, I have the strength of an arthritic grandmother and can’t return to sport yet.
Playing sport is the only form of exercise I have agreed to in my 30-odd years. I do not see the point in “going to the gym” if it isn’t going to make me better at playing a sport. I cannot participate in fitness for fitness sake. Which is why I’ve always eyed CrossFit and Hyrox with suspicion as activities for people who didn’t have the hand-eye co-ordination to play a real sport.
But now, for the first time in my life I am a gym member and a client of Australia’s most patient personal trainer, the long-suffering Tim, who is responsible for making sure my muscles don’t atrophy until I can start playing sports again. I pay him money to watch me lift heavy things and put them back again so I don’t drop them on myself. But mostly his job is making sure I turn up for the sessions because being a people pleaser and having the guilt of Irish Catholicism, I would hate to let him down.
He has been encouraging me to get back into running. Which made me realise why I gave it up in the first place. I was a runner. As in I went to athletics, had a coach, competed at high levels, and spent every week trying to shave down mere tenths of a second. For a split second, I could have been a somebody, a contender. But it turns out that instead of having actual talent, I was just really tall for my age and after school everyone else caught up. I retired on a high (at 19) but I never enjoyed running again, because I knew I wasn’t the best at it. Running now reminds me how stupid I was to give it up over feeling like I failed because I wasn’t going to get to the Commonwealth Games. (Never the Olympics – I was, above all, a realist.)
It is hard to be bad at something you were once good at. Our egos don’t like it. But off I go shuffling along the paths under the cover of night so no one can laugh at my bad form. No measuring times. No tracking distances. Just trying to get a little farther without stopping every time. Which is all we can really ask for in life.
