Running up that hill

Yorkshire pigs at animal sanctuary, Mark Peters

Like many athletic late-bloomers I had to overcome the trauma of school sports before I could start to willingly move my body for fitness reasons. I have a memory of a swimming instructor when I was maybe 6 or 7 forcing my head under the water as I held the edge of the pool and kicked. In the memory I told my mum about it and the lady wasn’t there after that, but that could be fantasy. I still can’t swim freestyle. I liked art and reading when I was a kid. I’m sure that’s partly innate, but I’m just saying I don’t recall my parents ever throwing a ball around with me. When given a choice I always picked the fake sports like tai chi or tenpin bowling. Any time I had to actually throw, catch or hit anything was a huge embarrassment. Gymnastics was a gamut of shame, between my glasses falling off and the constant fear of my clothes pulling down or riding up to show my big’n’tall body that always made me look older than I was. Cross country was the worst day of the year for me. I don’t know why I even cared, looking back it seems pretty chill to walk it with some other girls and be last across the finish line. It was a deep sense of failure at the time. When I had to actually run I hated it, I would be wheezing like an old man after thirty seconds and the burning in my legs felt like I was wading through tar. As soon as I was old enough to not have compulsory PhysEd anymore I stopped doing any regular exercise other than riding my bike, and then after I left school not even that.

Fortunately I’ve always walked for transport and had a lot of jobs where I was on my feet, so when I did want to start exercising I had a decent baseline to work with. The activities I’ve favoured are fairly solitary. Just moving my body through the world, through the water, against weights, against machines, against itself. I was a decent yogi for a while, but it started to give me the ick hearing about how yoga is the only exercise humans should be doing and the only medicine we should be taking. I had fun with progressive overload at the gym for about a year, then plateaued and didn’t care about it enough to try to push through. For another year I just kept moving the same weights every week, then gradually stopped in favour of running. I’ve been running on and off my whole adult life, but never consistently enough to improve until about 18 months ago. If you want to get into it properly you need to have a goal and a plan. I’m not exactly a scholar about it, but if there’s one thing that helped me it’s knowing that running slow for as long as you can is the main thing that will make you improve (assuming your goal is distance running). Once I started making some gains it became enjoyable going for a run in the same way as going for a walk. I still randomly get winded sometimes running for a bus if I’m already tired, but for the most part it feels like flying to be able to run for so long and so easily.

Yesterday I was in a team running event for the first time. If you had told me 10 or even 5 years ago that I would one day pay $50 to run on sloppy trails and crawl through mud with people from work I probably would’ve kms right then. Isn’t it wonderful how people can grow and change, because it was one of the funnest mornings I’ve had in a long time. As far as teamwork goes the only thing we really had to do was stay together and look out for each other at the obstacles. There were hurdles! There were tunnels! There was army crawling! There was … army recruiting at a tent near the finish line. The most challenging part in terms of dexterity was trying to go uphill on sections of track that were so muddy you can’t get any grip. The most arduous part was a section of really steep hill where you pull yourself up with a rope. There were two ropes and the one I was on had heaps of people going really slowly. I was looking over at the other rope that was pretty much empty, thinking about ducking under and switching, but my arms were too tired to do anything other than hold on. Oh and the rope was slick with mud of course. One of my teammates had a fitness watch and I kept asking how far we’d gone. When we got up to 4k I was still feeling great and excited for the final 2k, then we rounded a corner and were at the finish line. It was definitely not a 6k race, but I had a great time. The last obstacle was a waist-deep pond of dubious murk that we had to wade through right before the finish line. Me and my teammates clasped hands all the way through and in the photos from that part we are all grinning our faces off. In that moment I think I truly understood sports. A team W is so much greater than an individual one. We probably all could have gone faster if we’d been running alone, but having someone else there to experience the whole thing with you can’t be beat. I get it now. I’m not going to join the army but I have an appreciation for camaraderie that I haven’t felt since I was a teenager. Hope I can make up for lost time.

Do you think we can ever overcome the deep-seated individualism instilled in us by our culture and truly care for one another on a scale greater than the family unit? Do you have any athletic events coming up? Sound off below Purgies!