How running saved me from boozy lunches and obesity

Greetings everyone,

I am back at my desk and starting to work. But before I return to the miseries of contemporary politics, here is a piece of mine from a few years ago on the joy I found in running. After a year of false starts, I am now running again: slowly, painfully, with walking breaks when necessary, but back nevertheless. As I explain below, taking running up was one of my better decisions.

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Running the 2019 London Marathon

Four years ago, I put on what I used to call my gym kit and went for my first run in decades. Two hundred metres in, pain shot through my ample, but I liked to think, still manly physique. It was as if a sniper had taken out my legs. Abandoning all thought of fitness, I hobbled home, wincing with every step.

One should try to grow old honestly. And for middle-aged men that includes facing up to self-delusions. For anyone brought up in the journalistic culture of the late 20th century, the greatest delusions were about health. All kinds of subconscious diversion strategies clicked in whenever it was suggested that perhaps we should think about leaving the pub occasionally and taking some exercise.

Then, and indeed now, if a middle-aged man announces he is off for a boozy lunch, he is highly unlikely to say to himself: “But I must be careful. What about my liver? What about my heart?” He is even more unlikely to hear his beery friends say the same. They, too, do not want the thought to gain currency that boozing and gluttony may be dangerous.

When you announce you are taking up running, however, your friends turn into health freaks. “No, Nick,” they cry. “Think of the dangers. For God’s sake man THINK OF YOUR KNEES!”

That my knees, and indeed my thighs and calves, had gone within minutes of striding out confirmed what they and I wanted to know. Exercise was dangerous, and it was health fascism to think otherwise. Far better and safer to stay overweight, even though in my case I was obese (weighing about 18 stone or 114kg) and the real danger to my knees came from my forcing them to dead lift 30kg of surplus blubber every time I levered myself from a chair.