Jo Ind

This post is a repeat. I’m saying exactly what I said in my previous post, My ideal personal trainer, it’s just that sometimes, when you’re really trying to get into an idea, it helps to say it again in a different way.

I am still recovering from plantar fasciitis, a strain on my right heel brought about because my determination to run has been greater than my willingness to listen to my body.

When I realised the discomfort was brought about by morning spurts around the park, I didn’t run for two months (I swam instead) in the hope that rest would get me better. This has worked to some extent but not completely.

So now I’m trying a different tack.  I’m doing exercises to help my heel every day and in the past few weeks I’ve been back on the road, easing myself back into running kilometre by gentle kilometre.

And doesn’t it feel good? Doesn’t it feel great to be out in my running shoes again? To be getting fitter rather than slobbier? To be toning-up rather than filling-out? To be moving in the direction of a solid, firm torso rather than a wobbly blob blancmanged at the end of the sofa?

And that is my point:  getting fit is the easy bit. All it requires is a bit of will-power. If we decide that is what we want to do, most of us can do it.

It is on that road that I have met  my personal trainers.  They have been there as I have moved solid torso-ward.  We can all be happy when we’re doing that.

But my aspirations are deeper.

I want to embrace the whole of life and life involves being tired, being ill, being old and being injured.

Even if I were to run a Marathon, what would I do when I had done it?  No one can’t get fitter indefinitely. The time has to come when I am becoming less strong, more puffed and moving towards what, in my fear, I perceive as a wobbly blob.

My challenge is this – to be happy when I’m moving in that direction too. Unless I can crack that,  I’m only living half a life – and the easy half at that.

Image @Steve Wright

Why is a 5km run known as a fun run? That is a question I used to ask myself as I sweated it out on the treadmill – panting, smelly and desperate to sit down after a mere 3km’s interval training.

A 5km run is said to be for families and beginners. But despite years of working out at the gym, I would feel defeated after running little more than half that distance. “How do other people do it?” I wondered. “I can’t carry on any more…”

That was until last Saturday, when it was such a glorious spring morning I decided that instead of working out in the gym, I’d go for a jog around Kings Heath Park.

I had already found out that a figure of eight in Kings Heath Park is 2km, so I decided to do one and a half circuits and call that my workout for the day.

I started off. The frost on the grass was glistening like pearls in the low-morning sunshine. The bare trees stood in sculptural silouettes against the clear blue sky.   Tiny varieties of daffodils and snowdrops were peeping shyly from the earth.  The birds were calling to each other, reminding me of other dawns I had witnessed, other times when I am overwhelmed by the sheer sensuality of being alive. I completed one lap.

On the second circuit, replete with voluptousness, I decided to pray. I remembered a baby I knew who was in hospital, for one loop of the eight.  I thought about the people of Japan, for the second.  Every time I glanced at the roofs of the Kings Heath terraced houses, I would think of the people who lived in them, whose names I didn’t know but whose neighbourhood I shared.

“I’ve just run 4km,” I realised as I finished the lap.  “How come I couldn’t run 4km on a treadmill? Isn’t that a great example of the connection between body and spirit? Doesn’t that just show the fallacy of thinking of the body as a fixed, physical entity?”

And with that, I thought I may as well do another 2km circuit – and I did.

This post was inspired by a week in which my desktop had a virus. Virgin Media had changed its servers so I couldn’t access my emails. My spanking new laptop stared blankly at me and resolutely refused to run Windows 7 and the computer I had borrowed froze so many times I spent more hours hitting the refresh button than I did getting any work done.

(I also had an ankle injury and had to take my child out of nursery but that’s not the point of this post. The point is to find a way of smiling like a Buddhist cat amidst that particular frustration that could not have existed before the internet was invented.)

This is what I said to myself:

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