I don’t really know how to broach this subject. It’s so alien to me that I can barely believe it’s happening, but here goes.
I, as a lifelong idler, sluggard, sloth, couch potato, an entity so fundamentally inert that I may technically be a mineral, as someone who, when placed as a baby in one of those bouncy swings simply hung motionless and baffled until I was removed from its pointless grasp, have discovered…running. I’ve discovered it, I’m doing it – yes, of course in an amount and at a speed that would make anyone who has ever actually called themselves “a runner” collapse in laughter – and I am, in a very weird, obscure and twisted way, enjoying it.
As a committed non-exerciser, and particularly a non-runner, this development is basically bonkers. I might as well be sitting here telling you that I’ve learned to fly. It began when, as part of the research for a book I’m writing (albeit only slightly more successfully than I am “running”), I read about something called “Scout’s pace”. This is a method of covering long distances without dying (I paraphrase slightly). You run for 50 paces, walk for 50, run for 50 and so on and thus arrive at your destination markedly sooner than you would otherwise have done, but still alive. And I thought, for the first time in my life – I could do that. Maybe. Then I had a lie down, because it was quite a shock.
But the next time I left the house – about a week later, because I am not kidding about the sloth thing – I tried it. I ran across a big road against traffic and started counting the steps and it was already 30 by the time I got to the other side, so I just did another 20 and then stopped. Not least because I didn’t have a bra on and had to pretend-hold my bag across my chest, to stop the shenanigans.
I did not repeat the experiment on that walk. It was enough that I had proved my suspicions correct. Fifty paces is doable, even for potato-minerals. And so I’ve been doing more – and a few more and more – bouts since. Even with the still-minimal amount I am accomplishing, I feel better (if I look better, that’s still all Mounjaro’s doing). But I am not here to evangelise or proselytise about the benefits of exercise. I’m here to expound upon the weirdness of it.
I suspect I am very far from alone, especially amongst the female half of the population, in experiencing my body by and large – even though I have been blessed with a generally healthy, functioning one – as a thing that from adolescence onwards has found new and surprising ways to let me down.
First it gets greasy and spotty and hairy. Then you do/don’t get curves (in roughly inverse proportion to the amount you wish for them to arrive or not arrive). Then you start bleeding once a month (and look, period positivity is great ‘n’ everything but if there were an easier, neater way of perpetuating the miracle of life, we’d be fools not to take it).
It often gets too fat, wants to eat and drink things that are “bad”, wants to have sex when it shouldn’t, with people whom it shouldn’t. Before you know it, we’re into the pregnancy problem years (avoiding, securing, ending, losing), the accretion of a varied selection of the thousand and one ills that female flesh is heiress to, then the goddamn menopause.
Externally, there are wrinkles (to Botox or not to Botox?), sagging (to gather your upper arm skin in a bulldog clip or not to gather your upper arm skin in a bulldog clip?), still more hairiness – except on your scalp, where it’s thinning because why not – and a host of other things I do not have space to list here.
And yes, obviously, this is all the result of societal pressures, expectations and conventions. But unfortunately, society is where most of us live, and so unless you are gifted with an armoured psyche from birth, it becomes in essence a fact of life.
What has running to do with all this? Nothing, and everything. Because running is the antithesis of this deeply embedded – embodied, if I were feeling pretentious – sense of failure. Running is training your body, be it in the very smallest increments, to do something better, to become able to move as fast as you want it for as long as you want it to. To be, ultimately, a tool at your command instead of a receptable for others’ opinions and strictures.
Running is liberation. It’s like when you first learned to ride a bike and the world opened up – remember that joy? It is mastery of time and space. Try to (and now I am proselytising, I suppose) uncouple it from the desire to get thin, or even to get fit and think of it instead as regaining control. Or as gaining control you’ve never had before. That’s the key. Then, no matter how slowly you run, your demons can eat your dust.
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