Exercise? Pah!

Exercise? Pah.  I don't Do exercise. "Do you take exercise?" suggests a medical prescription, a pill of bitter taste and evil side effects. Exercise, the word itself conjures a slideshow of unpleasant recollections.  I am thirteen, standing at one point of a lattice while my classmates in identical jaundice yellow gym tunics  stand at others and fail to do star jumps or windmills or whatever other penance on the instruction of our mousy haired gym mistress.  I am eighteen, flute in hand, hands shaking, eyes watering, trying to keep blowing, playing finger twisting exercises out of an evil book labelled Ejercios diarios (it doesn't sound any better in Spanish), the flute teacher looking out the window, not troubling to disguise her contempt. I am 28, and the sergeant major i/c  frightening pregnant women at the maternity hospital has us all on the floor doing something or other which was supposed to be useful, but I can't remember why or what.  I don't do exercise because I don't like exercise.

Sport, now, I have time for sport.  As a kid I wished I was a boy so I could play football.  Girls didn't play football in those days. At school I played field hockey in a spirit of vengeance, a stick being an expressive tool in the hands of an angry teenager.  Mostly I hit the ball.  Not perhaps tennis - we played on clay courts; I spent too much time picking gravel out of my knees to enjoy the game.  Sport can still stir my spirit.  I can watch rugby with admiring horror.  The sight of eight strong men in a boat can bring tears to my eyes. These days, my place in most sport is on the sidelines.

But running, now that's the stuff.  Exercise is to running what Complan is to the finest of high table dining.  Running has infinite variety.  It has low cloudy days, when you have the fen to yourself and the gulls because no one else is daft enough to be out there.  By the river in the morning the eights are sweating, reminding me that I could probably try a little harder.  Or there is the changing life of the kingfisher stream - the curious purple flowers in May, the grasses that grow tall in summer and seed as the days grow shorter again.  Autumn turns summer's canopy of green to a tea-scented carpet of browns and yellows.  On winter days I scan the framework of empty branches for the low-flying streak of luminous blue. Mostly it is only there in my memory, but one day I will see it again.  It is quite true, I never run by the same stream twice.  I never know what I'm going to see.  

And that's just the entertainment laid on.  Then there's the running itself.  Long slow run?  How far?  What direction?  Run/walk? If so, what run/walk ratio? Intervals? How long?  How long a recovery? How many repetitions? Concentrate on core. Concentrate on not tensing muscles that don't need tensing.  Concentrate on glute media.  Let psoas stretch.  A bad run is the motivation for a more carefully planned and executed outing the next time.  A good run is gold.

A good run is so much more than gold. I will shortly be shedding the clothes of respectability and heading west from work to run to the hill that overlooks half of Cambridgeshire, to watch the sun sink beyond the land. I can see it now, already in my mind's eye, as I have run that way many times before.  From the top of the hill, with the American Cemetery quiet behind me, the roar of the motorway, the day's frustrations and aggravations alike muffled in the evening mist and faded in the dimming light.  A separate peace, accessible only through the effort of the climb, visible only through salt-crusted eyelashes in the fading light, durable enough to guard the spirit through the day to come.

Running is the motive as well as the means, the goal as well as the discipline to achieve it.  It is a belief, a healing force that has given me back the ability to walk, to work, to live as fully as any other.  Exercise - the word shouldn't even share the page with running.  

Have fun out there.