Exercise is a tricky thing to talk about. As a runner, I always feel a little bit awkward talking about running to anyone who’s not clad in lycra and carrying a water bottle. It’s generally considered a fairly boring topic, but it also carries a suggestion that what’s actually being talked about is ‘weight-loss’. I’m quite used to telling people that I run, and hearing a reply of ‘oh, but you don’t need to lose weight’. I guess this is fairly unsurprising; most women’s magazines will only mention exercise as an alien and obligatory evil in the never-ending campaign to Drop A Dress Size* or get Bikini Ready (are you beach-ready? Why yes, I have a thick coat and an enormous appetite for chips, where do you think we are, the flippin seychelles?!). However, I’m not one to make a sweeping generalistion and not back it up, so here’s an overview of the Cosmo online ‘diet and fitness’ section. It's quite a treat. This page features articles titled:
Are your co-workers making you fat?
Lose inches the low-carb way
(followed later by)
Why a low carb diet is a health risk
Three new weight-loss wonders
and
Stop with the exercise excuses!
Of sixteen articles on that page, only one explicitly mentions exercise in its headline. Someone could easily write another piece about the interesting fact that Cosmo’s ‘diet and fitness’ advice is almost all (sometimes conflicting) diet advice, teaching women to control and abstain, but I’m not going to get into that now. What I will say though, is that it’s very interesting that the only article to take exercise as its main theme does so negatively. Stop With The Exercise Excuses! portrays exercise as a necessary evil that people will do anything to get out of. Instead of tackling this view, the article just insists that really, you should probably put your trainers on, even if you really don’t want to. It does nothing to persuade the reader of why an active lifestyle is a great thing, other than churn out some tokenistic, bullshit after-thought about endorphins, which is pretty much on the same level as telling a child they should eat their greens because they’ll grow ‘big and strong’.
Exercise as a topic in women’s magazines is cushioned in a discourse of ‘weight-loss’. Not health. Not even really fitness, or strength, or vitality. Weight-loss. It seems to suggest that ‘if weight-loss isn’t your goal, why the hell would you even be in a gym?!’ This whole ‘necessary evil’ approach to occasionally-moving-your-body in order to change your appearance creates a pretty thankless, impossible situation: if trying to look like Rihanna is your only reason for pulling on a pair of trainers, you’re probably only going to give up two weeks later when you realise that you still look pretty much exactly the same as you did before.
It’s a shame that this is the predominant way in which most women’s magazines will ever talk about exercise, because in this approach, your body is the enemy and something that needs to be transformed and moulded into something (or someone) entirely different. The important thing is the beholder; if you’re not looking acceptable in beachwear, you should really sort that out. In this view, exercise is awful, and the only good thing to come out of it is that you’ll change how you look**.
In three months of half marathon training, I’ve lost no weight. I say that happily, and with no sense of failure, as losing weight was never my aim. Give or take a few pounds, I’m exactly the same weight I was when I started all this running malarkey. My stomach is maybe a little flatter, my legs perhaps slightly more toned, but the change in appearance has not been dramatic and is certainly no more than could have been achieved by some fairly structured underwear. If the only positive thing about exercise was its role in changing how we look, I would’ve given up a long time ago. Luckily, it isn’t what I go running for.
Ever keen not to always just be talking about myself, I spoke to a couple of friends of mine about why they go running/jumping/climbing trees. The thrill of setting (sometimes gruelling) challenges and achieving them, was one cited motivation. One friend particularly loved the simplicity and independence of running. My other friend is a team player, and it was the competition that was a strong motivaton for her. Both of these women acknowledged that exercise greatly increased their self-esteem, which is something I’d agree with; but it’s not a self-esteem that is rooted in how they look, or how others behold them, but one that is rooted in the knowledge that they can do something really, really well. They get their thrill from the success, the challenge, the strength and the ‘my body can do WHAT NOW?’ of what they do.
As for me, I love running, and it’s for the reasons that my friends also shared; It’s made me fitter, it’s made me faster, it’s made me stronger. It's not easy, and I have to work at it, but that makes it all the more rewarding. I can run up hills now, big, big hills***. I can run 10 miles. I can run for 2hrs. When, 5 months ago, running 5 miles was a mammoth challenge, the progress I’ve made is quite thrilling, and more than a little bit addictive. My body isn’t the enemy, or something that needs to be changed; it’s a tool, an asset, and I marvel at the things it can do now. I’m not going to deny that seeing my body get a bit leaner is quite nice, but it’s certainly not the primary motivation driving me to repeatedly return to the blood sweat and tears of long distance runs.
Exercise is not something I do to ‘get’ something; to ‘get’ ‘a washboard stomach like Cameron Diaz’s, a bum like J-Lo’s and a pair of pins like Elle McPherson’s’ . It’s not my means to a future where I’ll hopefully, finally, be happy with what I am. I don’t do it to ‘get’ a life, I do it to ‘have’ a life. Running is joyous. In a ‘ergh, I’m bright pink and I taste of salt’ kind of way. It’s given me so much more energy, and my mood has rarely ever been as consistently good as it is right now. Running allows me to do big, looping routes around my city, and see parts of it I’d never before discovered; It’s been a bonding point between me and my boyfriend, who runs with me, goes to the gym with me, pushes me out of the door if I get a bit lazy; It’s allowed me to raise £500 for Mind, the mental health charity (and if on the off chance you’d like to sponsor me, you can do it here). On Sunday, when I do The Great North Run, running will be the reason behind an INCREDIBLE day out that will include my family, live bands, the Red Arrows and a heaving sense of achievement.
And then, in October, I’ll be running a 5k zombie infested assault course in Cambridge; my main motivation here being, obviously, the need to see if I would outlive my friends in a zombie apocalypse.
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* Don’t you love the way that ‘Drop a Dress Size’ articles never make any reference what size you might already be, so whatever size you are, you should always be thinking about getting smaller.
**I do appreciate that school PE lessons probably also have a major part to play in the general ‘exercise as form of punishment’ mentality, but that really is a whole other blog for a whole other day.
***I can run up Headington Hill. Slowly. But, by gads, I make it to the top.
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