April 16, 2020

trundling along

I am writing to you from the safe side of baby’s first couch to 5k running session. What it has taught me is that I am feeble. I am frail as shit, lads; you heard it here first. I am woefully unqualified to write anything resembling a thinkpiece on the subject of exercise, on account of how I hate it and I hate to be seen doing it. And yet!!

I do not enjoy embodiment. I have never particularly enjoyed it, even during the brief window of time when I was objectively quite cute (20-24; rest in pieces). Exercise in any kind of public setting, therefore, is just about the pinnacle of things I do not enjoy. Not only do I have to be visible to other people — already a terrible thing, and the reason why I’m always sort of existentially fatigued after a commute — but I have to be visible to other people while doing something I know for a fact I’m not good at. Two for two! A merciless one-two punch of loathsomeness. Horrors unceasing. When I set out for my run this evening, which I mostly did because I was bored and frustrated and tired of my own inertia, I deliberately did not put on my glasses, so I wouldn’t have to see other people bearing witness to me.

So: I just ran for half an hour. Which is to say, I ran for sixty seconds, then walked for ninety seconds, then repeated the process for twenty minutes. Tack a five-minute walk onto either end. I used to walk for five miles every weekend; I am horrified at the atrophy of my flesh.

Some people say that exercise feels triumphant. I do not agree, at least for now. I certainly feel as though I’ve accomplished something, albeit something arbitrary, but that accomplishment is heavily offset by how comprehensively gross I feel. I got back to the flat dripping with sweat, my feet hurting from my trainers, my legs hurting from undergoing exertion, and my head throbbing from Christ alone knows what. Why does your head throb when you’ve overexerted yourself? I have since taken a shower, and the leg hurt has settled into a solid, metronomic ache which is a powerful deterrent to standing up ever again. I am acutely conscious that this letter has disintegrated into a long-form complaint about something I inflicted on myself.

Lockdown in the UK was extended today. We have at least another three weeks on the clock. That’s okay; that’s probably for the best. We are in a pretty shitty state over here, and we owe it to one another to mitigate that as carefully as we can. I wasn’t thinking about lockdown when I got up on a whim and went out for a run. I wasn’t consciously thinking about lockdown. If you can believe it, my original plan for the duration of the crisis was to take a daily morning walk; obviously that fell by the wayside as soon as I realised I could technically work from bed. But I am thinking about lockdown now, and about whether anything will have changed in three weeks’ time, and about what things are in my power to change.

That’s why I am going to run again. And again. And then I’m probably going to do the first week of couch to 5k over again, because I am (as discussed) terribly feeble and not well-equipped for intensive exercise. Sure, this evening I stumbled for half an hour through a streetlit blur with no glasses, and I came home feeling gross and sore and vexed with all things. But perhaps in three weeks’ time I will still be going for runs, and I will be coming home feeling — still gross, probably, but less sore, and more triumphant than vexed. Perhaps it will be easier to do. Perhaps, in three weeks’ time, I will even (dare I say it) have moved on to week two.

What I’ve got, and what I can control, is my self: my routines, my behaviours, my ability to keep moving. Exercise is terrible. I’m going to do it anyway, I think.

W

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