Getting fit in middle age: a marathon addict, a couch potato and others share their pain

‘It turns out the runner’s high is also a real thing’

– Alexis Petridis

I can’t really pinpoint what started me off worrying about my health. One minute I seemed to be happily careering through life, Marlboro Menthol in one hand, gin and tonic in the other, treating anyone who took exercise with the total disdain they evidently deserved; the next thing I knew, I’d turned into a walking library of quiet neuroses about everything: how much I smoked, how much I drank, what I weighed. Especially what I weighed. I’d been incredibly skinny my whole life, then I hit my 40s and put on the best part of three stone. It wouldn’t have mattered had it been evenly distributed but it all went on my stomach. My arms and legs were still incredibly skinny. Increasingly, my youngest daughter’s drawings of me – pea-sized head balanced on enormous circular body, lines for limbs – looked less like a four year old trying to grapple with concepts of space and representation in the pre-schematic stage of development than a photorealist portrait.

So I took up running, largely because it required virtually no financial outlay on my part: if, as seemed likely, I packed it in after four attempts, at least I wouldn’t be left with a direct debit to cancel or a spare room full of kit in mint condition save for the inch of dust. I got a couch to 5K app for my phone – a stern American lady telling you when to walk and when to run over the music of your choice. I cobbled together an outfit from what I had: an old sweatshirt, jogging bottoms, a woolly hat with a Nike swoosh that I had no recollection of buying. “You look like a burglar,” offered my wife.

Words can scarcely begin to communicate how astonished I was to find that I actively enjoyed it: I did the couch-to-5k programme, then a 5k to 10k programme, then entered a 10k race along Brighton seafront, by which point I felt as though I scarcely knew myself. I liked the weirdly concentrated communication I had with music when I was running: I found myself fixating on what I was listening to in a really intense way, probably because doing so took my mind off how much my legs hurt. I liked the smug feeling of achievement I got when I’d completed a run, or indeed noticed I’d lost a bit of weight: I’d never achieved anything sporting in my life, unless you count developing a nonpareil ability to bunk off games undetected. I liked the way it cleared my head: astonishingly, it turns out all that absolute crap about exercise giving you mental equilibrium is true. It turns out the runner’s high is also a real thing – it seems to kick in after about 40 minutes. As a veteran of the early 90s rave scene, I think I can say with some authority it’s not to be sniffed at as far as fleeting bursts of transcendent euphoria go. Moreover, going for a run is the only truly effective hangover cure I’ve ever found, by which you may deduce that I haven’t radically overhauled the rest of my lifestyle in search of bounteous good health. I’m now a runner – a sentence I would once have been no more likely to utter than “I’m now the Vice President of Botswana” – and that will have to do.

‘I am and always have been pathologically lazy’

– Lucy Mangan

I will see your sedentary lifestyle and raise you an imminent cardiac event. And I will win. I have walked 12 feet in the past three hours (to the microwave and back to heat up the remains of yesterday evening’s takeaway for today’s lunch) and there isn’t much chance of anything else happening before I drag myself up 16 stairs at bedtime. I will be sitting here typing stuff, like I do day in and day out and have done for the past 15 years. I work hard and I work every single day, including weekends, which does leave less time for exercise, but my real problem is that I am and always have been pathologically lazy physically.

But I’m 41 now and the lack of strain is beginning to show. My joints are stiffening and my arteries are hardening while the rest of my pallid, toneless body looks like it’s melting. I grunt when I kneel down with my five-year-old and he has to help me when we get up.

People who like exercise are the luckiest people. Imagine enjoying something that was good for you. What a blessing. What a boon from an otherwise habitually unbenevolent God. He didn’t even gift me a taste for fruit and veg. There’s no point asking me to become a healthy eater (by which I basically mean a regular consumer of apples. I have never even been in the same room as a spiralised courgette. Or a Deliciously Ella) and/or regular exerciser at this stage of the game. You might as well ask me ask me to become a three-year-old Border Leicester.

But something must be done. I can feel trouble being stored up. Age-inflation is eroding the value of the brownie points I earn for never having smoked and not being much of a drinker. They are no longer buying the prophylaxis against disease and decay they once did. I am staring, I know, down the barrel of an unnecessarily decrepit old age.

Will generalised nagging by the new public health campaign be the thing that pushes me over the edge and into the world of mild to moderate exercise? Every little helps, I suppose. But it’s the increasing aches and pains and leaden limbs and slabs of flab that together induce the feeling that my body is no longer my own, that it is becoming slowly more of a prison than a vehicle, something that will within too few years become something that hinders rather than helps me live my life, that will motivate me in the end.

OK. OK. I’ll tell you what. I’ll finish this and go for a walk. We’ll see where I end up.

‘When I run, or play tennis, my head feels better’
– Simon Hattenstone

I’m sorry, but life doesn’t work out like that. You can’t make a pact with Jane Fonda and the god of green juices and win yourself an extra 20 years. Take my mate Jack the Chop. Now Jacko was the fittest, freshest, youngest, 84-year-old tennis partner a man could have. Didn’t smoke, barely drank. Always laughed. If ever there was man destined for a telegram from the Queen, it was our Jack. Then one day he went out walking with weights, and keeled over with a stroke. We still miss you, Jacko.

Now take my dad. Dad smoked between 40 and 60 cigarettes a day for 80-odd years, never did any exercise apart from lifting said fag to mouth, and ate like a chocoholic horse. In his later years, he was bent as a fish hook, and looked so old that strangers refused to believe he was only in his 90s. Anyway, Dad barely had a health problem in his life. Miss you too, Dad.

Now I’m 53, I have made a few so-called “lifestyle” changes, but not in the hope of longevity. I no longer smoke, but that’s just because I did a deal with my daughter. It’s not as if I’d ever tried or wanted to stop, and to be honest I could run just as well with a chronic wheeze.

I don’t drink every night any more. I restrict most of my drinking to Binge Friday. Get it all out of the way in one night – saves on time and hangovers. I’ve discovered that Bombay Mix isn’t quite the great slimmers’ panacea I once believed it to be, and try to restrict myself to fewer than four bars of chocolate a day, excluding chocolate liqueurs (not included in the alcohol intake).

I play football badly, swim even worse, jog when I haven’t got football injuries, do keepy-uppy in the street, and play tennis with partners who haven’t yet died on me. If I were wise, I’d swap football for pilates, and start stretching properly.

You can’t have everything, though, and I do try to keep fit in my own cack-handed way. But I’m not doing it in the hope of blagging a few extra years out of my body. It just makes the present more bearable. When I run, or play tennis, my head feels better – and on a very good day so does my body. Yes, I suppose I am doing a deal of sorts, but we’re not talking longterm interest here – just instant savers. The more I exercise, the more I can indulge. Even as I’m running the first hundred yards, I’m thinking of the chocolate at the end of the Regent’s canal rainbow. Instant gratification. That’s what keeps me rolling.

‘I wouldn’t mind being fit for the everyday battles of today’

– Stephen Moss

Do not take any life lessons from journalists. Mostly, we’re physically unfit and, worse, spiritually sick. So far today I have had two espressos, a latte, a hurried soup and sandwich at Pret, and a Mars bar. To inspire this short piece, I felt the need for a cup of tea (with sugar) and two chocolate digestives. We are basically a lost cause.

I am 58 and about four stone overweight. I periodically vow to do something about this – usually at new year – but generally nothing happens. I am a member of a very expensive gym (£83 a month when I last looked), but go maybe once a fortnight. When I do attend, I swim briefly and then sit in the Jacuzzi or the steam room. I rarely set foot inside the gym itself.

None of this bothers me especially. Or, rather, the spiritual sickness worries me much more than the fact that my body is not perfectly honed. My father has smoked since he was six, joined the Marines when he was 17, and has had a tough labouring life with a classically working-class diet. He is still wheezing on at 85. My grandmother more or less lived on bananas for the last 30 years of her life. She died at 89. I have known people who lived in the gym and consumed only orange smoothies who have died in their 50s. It’s a lottery, mostly genetic.

I will probably get to 80, and after that, frankly, who cares? As Philip Roth said: “Old age isn’t a battle, it’s a massacre.” No matter how much you look after yourself physically, we’re all on the downward escalator. I do not want to be a sprightly (but still essentially incapacitated) 93-year-old. I thank Public Health England for its concern, but there are surely better things for it to spend its money on – cancer treatment, more GPs, useful stuff like that.

Despite my excessive weight and dodgy lifestyle, I still feel OK-ish. I haven’t smoked since I was a student – I was reading Sartre and had a phase when I thought smoking Gauloises would enhance my existentialist credibility. I occasionally drink immoderately, but then go for weeks without touching a drop, which I think is better than daily dependence. I have never taken drugs. I walk a lot, mainly because I don’t like driving, can’t be bothered to wait for buses, and am too lazy to work out tube routes.

I still feel a physical engagement with life. I need to walk, swim, occasionally punch a heavy bag – in my more committed gym-going period in my 40s I did some boxing, which was the most interesting and directed physical activity I’ve ever done, much better than endless reps on a bench press.

Getting fit for the sake of it – or even with the aim of living longer – doesn’t interest me. There has to be some more immediate purpose. In 2000, I got fit so I could fight in a “white-collar” boxing bout in New York – luckily the organisers matched me against a little guy who was 10 years older than me and was recovering from a heart attack.

Back then, the process of getting fit – personal trainer three times a week, lots of additional gym sessions, regular runs – was great, but it took up so much time I couldn’t do anything else.

Now, if I periodically fret about my state of health, my fitness and stamina (or lack of it), it’s because I feel I need to be in better shape to compete in the Darwinian world of the media, or just because I would be a better, clearer-headed person if I could lay off the M&S hot cross buns. I really don’t care about being compos mentis in my late 80s (too much of what I really care about will have gone by then), but I wouldn’t mind being fit for the everyday battles of today, better placed to make a difference, less inclined to go with the flow and accept compromises. Fit for living, rather than fit for life, if you accept the distinction.

‘I wanted to be able to conquer that hill by the end of the month’
– Ronnie Haydon

It was a fairly typical dread of middle-aged spread that first sent me running to the hills before breakfast. The fact that I couldn’t jog all the way up the steepest slope of my local park without going through what felt like a near-death experience was shaming, but also presented me with a goal I reckoned was achievable. I wanted to be able to conquer that hill by the end of the month.

I enjoyed the peace and beauty of the park in the early morning. Running 20 minutes outdoors in all weathers left me chipper for the rest of the day. I didn’t run with music, I didn’t have any fancy kit (I didn’t feel “qualified” to buy the skin-tight leggings I saw proper runners wearing), my trainers were elderly and let in water. Getting up the hill without walking was the first of many goals.

As with many besotted new runners, it was a revelation to find a local Race for Life. Signing up gives you a handy training plan and plenty of online encouragement, and being out there with all those women, running for three whole miles, felt like a major achievement. I was 44 and felt, as I overtook women half my age (OK, they were jogging), like an athlete.

I asked a few women after the race if they knew of any local running clubs. There was one, yes, with a women’s section, and they trained on a Tuesday night on the frankly terrifying athletics track five minutes from my house. My first few Tuesdays were spent puffing round being lapped by gazelles, but I found other women who were as slow and as old as me, and were happy to coach me.

The club plunged me into a world of training runs, marathon talk, injury chat, earthy conversations about dodgy pelvic floors and club awaydays to cross-country meetings or seaside 10ks. My family thought I was nuts. My then teenage son requested I refrain from turning up to his football matches in knee-high compression socks and short shorts, but mostly they were all supportive. My sister arranged a huge family picnic in St James’s Park to celebrate my first ever London Marathon (2009).

I’m 53 now. My latest goal is to run the London Marathon in around three and a half hours. My love of running, I believe, has meant peri-menopause and menopause have had no impact on my life beyond not needing to buy sanitary ware. It has kept me sane through family trauma, career meltdown and invisible woman syndrome.

It has also set me on a mission to coach other middle-aged women not just to “be a bit fitter” (although that is obviously good) but to realise they’re still strong, can still build muscle, can still jump for joy, run up hills and be, if running is their thing, Good For Age.

@ronnie_haydon blogging on Marathon Gran

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