IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:I don't believe in maintaining anything, neither my overworked legs nor my cheeky children, writes ADAM BROPHY
PHYSIO MAURICE takes a look at my quads (that’s quadriceps to you non-athletes, ie the thigh muscle) and proclaims the right one wasted. The way he’s peering at them, there seems to be a slight look of disgust, like my skinny thighs are unmanly.
“Oi, physio Maurice. Can you just fix the pain in my calf so I can run again, and lay off the big girl’s legs jokes?”
He says most definitely. And, as with most in his profession, in my experience anyway, he lays the blame for my discomfort entirely at my door.
I don’t stretch before, during and after exercise. I don’t lift weights to ensure my body parts are powered up to the max. I don’t squat, thrust, pull or push 17 times a week to promote ease of blood flow during exercise. No, I just run every couple of days because it’s straightforward. You exit the house and run, for however long you want. No machines or accoutrements required.
That, apparently, is the problem. And now my skinny girl legs are revolting. In both senses of the word. This is quite worrying as I have been training for the Dublin marathon which takes place next week.
I don’t want to have trundled through hundreds of miles of country lanes, been ratty to my family due to exhaustion and bored the ears off anyone stupid enough to sit down with me about the psychological benefits of repetitive exercise, only to be told I can’t make the start line.
Physio Maurice is instructing me in a number of new and important stretches I need to build into my running routine. He picks up on the blank expression in my eyes and realises nothing is staying on the hard drive.
I might, at a stretch, stretch for the next week, but then I’ll forget everything he’s told me.
He instructs me to get back on the table and submits my tight muscles to an hour of intense agony. He ignores my yelps and pleas for mercy, and instead kneads and twists the veiny ropes attached to my stems back into some semblance of normal human shape. It is only after he has done his work, and I have sweated pain through his towel, that I realise my legs previously resembled Quasimodo’s hump.
The laborious point I am making here is that I can’t expect them to stay in any fit shape if I continue to abuse them while refusing them any maintenance.
As with the brats, who these days are nipping at my head with the precision of a woodpecker at a tree trunk, my legs need to be coaxed if they are to continue to do my bidding.
I have no patience for coaxing. Things and people should work as they are intended to, ad infinitum. I watch people washing their cars, vacuuming their carpets, oiling the chains on their bicycles and repeatedly attempting to teach their children how to behave and I wonder, “Why?”
It feels like there isn’t time for maintenance when fitting in what I need to get done in the day takes up every waking minute. Things, bodily parts and inanimate objects should continue to manage the function for which they were intended until a replacement part is available.
Children should be told an appropriate response or behaviour once, and forever more replicate what is required in the given situation.
Do you think the brats listen? Gah, they’re worse than my waify legs. As I pick up the mess they have left behind despite being told to tidy up after themselves every day since they could hear, I sometimes cannot relate the person I am now to who I was before children.
I imagine my old self shaking his head at me as I find myself being irritated at their inconsiderateness, messiness and cheekiness. My old self would have known how to sort things out. My old self knew everything.
My new self is a bit of a drip. He gets sullen and stroppy when he doesn’t get his own way, when things don’t work for him immediately. My new self is a bit of a spoilt child and he wonders why his own kids exhibit the same tendencies.
But my new self has been tired for eight years now, since the first one appeared, so I cut him some slack. The new self is also a lot less sure of things than the old one was. The kids have taught him uncertainty.
The kids’ll figure things out and may even, some day, stop deliberately winding me up. I’m less sure of the nancy boy leg. Can it manage 26 miles?