I had managed to be quite active for quite a long time because of cycling. Once I started measuring everything, including my calories and my weight and all my activity, I started getting more interested in getting fitter. Some of this was just selfishness… earning more calories (because deep in my soul I remain greedy). But also because cycling on its own had started to feel too easy, like I wasn’t really getting much out of it.
Running was next. I started in a gym on a treadmill, working my way up from a few hundred metres, gradually further and faster.
Running, especially when you start, is boring as hell. As it turns out, being fit for cycling doesn’t help much with running – your legs have a whole other set of muscles and bits to start hurting and aching in a different way.
I solved the boredom problem with audiobooks. I prefer them to music because music is a metronome and you end up running in time with it – great if it’s the right tempo but annoying if its too fast or slow. But even then, in a gym, just slogging away, its dull and you have to make time in your day.
So, two or three christmases ago, I was off work and realised that I was missing cycling. I had actually reached the point where I needed exercise. So I went to the park and did something I hadn’t done for about 35 years: I ran. Outside. In full view of other people.
I broke a rule I had formed in school, when being galloped past by my fellow pupils desperate to avoid being late as I ambled in at the last possible moment. Nothing was so urgent as to need to run. I had avoided it ever since (can you begin to see yet how I got so fat and unfit?)
My first run in the park didn’t last long. A hundred metres, probably, then a bit of a stroll. I progressed to laps of a few paths in the park, as my family mucked about in the middle. That December I managed a total of 11km.
As I have discovered, though, the key to success is habits. I persisted. I built up over the year and managed over 500km in that first twelve months. This year so far I have managed 1700km. My lockdown challenge, with cycling to the office off the agenda, has been to try to run every day and I have mostly managed it. As well as getting fit, I think it has kept me sane, and if there was ever a time to feel fit and thin, this particular pandemic was a good moment.
What’s the point of all this? I guess its that, despite my decades-long aversion, running is worth a try. All you need is some shoes and some outside space. You can do as much or as little as you like and it’s an easy habit to keep up. Not being over-ambitious, accepting that some days you’ll be more in the zone than others, but that you will keep feeling better and better is what makes it easy.
And you can eat a little more, if that floats your boat.
Suddenly thinner 