Health, & Fitness Guide

 

I’ve fallen in love with making myself stronger’

In May 2021, I joined a gym. While many put on weight during lockdown, I’d lost 9kg (20lb) from walking every evening, no social eating and doing online Hiit classes twice a week. But I was itching to get even fitter. Fitness has its momentum; the fitter you get, the more of it you want. I had seen many “strength training” clips on Insta of women of all ages pumping iron and I knew instinctively that there was something here.

While I had never lifted weights before, I knew it improved bone density, muscle and overall wellbeing. In 2018, a fractured foot led to a bone scan that had uncovered osteopenia (less severe than osteoporosis), common in women my age – and I hoped it would help.

I joined a local mixed gym and hired a male personal trainer. Joining a proper weights room is intimidating. It looks like a torture chamber. Actually, it is one. Racks, benches, unfathomable contraptions, dumbbells, kettle bells, barbells – all industrial looking – ropes and pulleys, and buckets of clips, resistance bands and even sandbags. I felt small (these gyms are full of large, muscle-bound men) and men did flirt, incredibly, even with my 57-year-old professor’s arse. I was stunned. Me? Not cool; not there, where I felt vulnerable and was trying to get fit in private. And so, in November 2021, I found StrongHer, an all-female training gym close to where I live.

 Strength training releases serotonin, the feelgood hormone. Train consistently and you will feel well consistently

Housed under an old railway arch, StrongHer was founded by women (Tig Hodson and Sam Prynn), for women, and its aim is simple: empowering women. The arch is strip lit and catchy music is on at full volume. It’s like walking into a nightclub, even at 9am on a Sunday.

I tried a couple of high-energy weightlifting circuit classes, but soon realised that all I really wanted to do was work one-to-one. I approached Abi Skipper after attending one of her classes. She is 20 years younger than me, and I loved her huge laugh and positive energy. Finding StrongHer, and meeting Abi, who would become my personal trainer, is up there with those great change moments.

Once I hired Abi (personal trainers at StrongHer range from £50-£80 an hour), I went off-peak, during afternoons, when it’s quiet. It was during my one-to-one sessions that I got to clock the other women coming in: women in hijabs, younger women and other women my age, all quietly racking and deracking their barbells.

I’ve fallen in love with the process of making my body stronger and more flexible. You don’t need to “lift heavy” to do this. The most I’ve deadlifted (lifting a weight straight off the ground) is 45kg; the most I’ve squatted is about 30kg. I bench 20kg, at a push. In this time, I’ve discovered an old injury in my left quad and had it healed by one of the best physios in town.

I have learned that getting stronger is fun and fulfilling. And that strength training releases serotonin, the feelgood hormone. Train consistently and you will feel well consistently. From the outside, training might look rather meaningless, even a little shallow. But, trust me, lifting weights boosts the soul. It’s an emotional workout, too. And it’s also not about the dreaded mundane female goal of “losing weight”.

Since joining StrongHer, I’ve lost no weight and yet I do look slimmer, or maybe just different. When you train for strength, guess what? You get stronger. My body before strength training was flabby and had lost its lines and shape. Eighteen months in, my arms are firm, my legs are limber, stronger and more shapely, and my arse has never looked better. And yet I’m not that light in weight. I’m a size 14. I’ve gained muscle mass and bone density. In October this year, I also found, through Abi, a great nutritionist, Ellie Gelded.

I tried many apps during my fitness journey, from a Fitbit Versa Lite, for tracking steps, to glucose monitor Veri. All have helped me “track” habits without the dull grind of tracking calories.

While I’m never going to look like Nicole Kidman, I don’t want to. Strength training, especially in an all-female gym, is a feminist choice; it’s political. My trainer is a woman, the rest of the crew are women, and we set our own pace and cheer each other on. We make each other happy. Win, win.

For more information on women-only weights gyms, go to womenshealthmag.com

I realised I wasn’t going to die that day. And that, if I wanted to, I could run. Was I too late?’

I have always envied runners. For years I would watch them scattered along the seafront as I rode into Brighton on the top deck of a bus. Runners captivated me. I envied their cheerful solitude and metronome grace, arms tracing neat rhythms in the air. I envied their focus: they found the time in the daily muddle of work and family to be out here with the sky and the ocean breeze. Someday, I told myself, I will join them.

A strange ambition, really. I was never the most active person; I never played sports or learned to swim. Then, almost a decade ago, I got multiple sclerosis. MS is a disease in which the coating of cells in the central nervous system is damaged, disrupting the transmission of messages. It causes symptoms from mild confusion to paralysis, and can affect almost all parts of the body, but it frequently leads to balance problems and muscle spasticity. Not an ideal situation for a runner, although I should add there are great athletes who have MS, such as sprinter Kadeena Cox and 400m hurdler Lina Nielsen.

I was 35 when I was diagnosed. I stumbled from GP to specialists, from MRIs to neurology wards. I was lucky, though. With careful treatment, its progress was slowed. MS was not over, but it became something I might exist alongside. In the thick of symptoms, I had felt jarringly, vividly alive; emerging from that, I wanted to make the most of whatever came next.

So I woke up one spring morning last year, firmly into my mid-40s, with hundreds of middle-aged worries teetering over me, and I realised with surprise that not one of them had anything to do with MS. I realised I wasn’t going to die that day. And I realised that, if I wanted to, I could run. Was I too late?

A runner needs a goal. I had a simple vision of my future self lacing shoes, leaving the house, picking a direction and running. No marathons, just running for half an hour, which I read puts you in 5km territory.

On a sharp April morning I downloaded the Couch to 5K app. This takes you from not running at all to running for 30-minute chunks in nine weeks: three runs a week, interspersing intervals of walking. It worked, I gathered. My brother and colleagues had done it.

With the app downloaded, I pulled on threadbare Converse, which even I was pretty sure weren’t made for running, a T-shirt and joggers bought for a Halloween party. I headed for a park, the ground squeaky with dew.

The first Couch to 5K session is short: 60 seconds of running followed by 90 seconds of walking, repeated seven times. I told myself this was nothing, although I sensed panic building. Would MS re-emerge and flatten me? I tried to empty my head. Warm-up done, I resettled my wife’s headphones over my ears and ran.

I laughed out loud at first. For those startled opening seconds, my body felt rickety and preposterous. There’s no future in this, I thought, as my legs juddered ominously. Was this MS, or was it years of sitting around? I ran for 20 seconds, feeling like an idiot. Someone’s going to stop me, I thought. Can you be arrested purely for doing something so obviously out of character? But then I reached my first corner and turned.

The rickety feeling didn’t disappear, but I suddenly understood that it wasn’t anything I recognised from MS. It was movement, speed and the thudding of feet. I was running, each moment feeding the next. The following 40 seconds passed in a rush, and I was annoyed to have to walk for an interval afterwards. This first session rolled on, easy, then tricky. By the sixth interval I was drained, but determined to finish.

The joy as I stumbled home, the voluble cheer that I felt for the rest of the day as I chattered mindlessly while my daughter did her homework, was something I was not prepared for. And the feeling returned after the next runs, each preposterous at first, then simultaneously exhausting and exhilarating.

I learned a lot in those initial sessions. I got used to the kind, conspiratorial voice of the writer Sanjeev Kohli in my ear, speaking through the app, telling me when to run or walk. I learned the times I’d have the park to myself. Also, I was starting to see runs in terms of two halves.

For the first half I was cheerful and poised, padding through a Jimmy Stewart world, nodding at postmen and smiling at angry little dogs. For the second half I was sweaty and stumbling, an escaped convict pursued over moors by bobbies with bloodhounds. The task was to extend the first half indefinitely.

As I went on I picked up another app, Strava, which tracks runs and gave me an overview of the tiny distances I was suddenly covering every week: 2.4km, 2.8km. The app turned each run into a visual trail, superimposing my wayward paths on to the landscape I ran through, like seeing my body’s handwriting.

But there were other loops. I got visual migraines, arcs of jangling golden lines that felt like a rip had formed in my vision. Familiar since my diagnosis, the regularity of them was new. As I ran, getting steadier and more confident, I would wait for them to ignite.

I also started to sense the contours of MS inside me. It wasn’t pain, although spasticity could make my calves so tight they felt like nasty little stones glued to my legs. It was more the sense that I was running within a boundary. I could go so fast but no faster. Maybe I would find that I could go so far and no farther. Was this boundary real? I couldn’t tell.

Three weeks in, my knees started to ache. My wife suggested the Converse had to go. I bought my first running shoes. It felt like a breakthrough: my bad knees had nothing to do with MS. This was just part of running.

I had discovered I liked to run, loved the chummy exhaustion and the impact of my feet on the ground. The knee pain had gone and I sensed the special collaboration of exercise: a coming together of all the pieces of me. If I hadn’t had enough water beforehand, my throat would tell me. If I neglected my breathing, my lungs would tell me. My body also sent warnings at times. If my balance was bad, I’d lurch and stumble. Time to turn back, ceding a temporary victory to MS.

After runs I came home frothing with ideas: flavour combinations, books to read, old friends to get on the phone. I wanted to know about oil painting, the names of the birds I’d seen and the trees I’d passed. At its best, running is like being loaned someone else’s brain.

By the end of week five I reached a run I simply could not do: 20 minutes, no intervals. The joy was in me, the energy was not; I had outrun my willpower. This is where the weeks started to stretch into months. From week five, I went back to week four, then three.

Soon I was stuck, orbiting weeks three and six. Late in a repeat of week five, Kohli told me: “You can call me Sanj now.” I almost wept. He’d known me for five weeks, so it seemed appropriate to him. But I had known him for 20 weeks.

I hated to be out of step with Sanj. He’d compliment my running, but he could not tell when I’d stopped and decided to walk. As I’d stagger about, defeated, I’d hear him say, “You’re doing really well!” or, “I’m proud of you!” My heart would break a little, as I had lied to Sanj.

To get unstuck, I borrowed a trick I had used with MS. Faced with strange new symptoms, I tracked them in a notebook. So I began a running journal, searching for a simple formula for success. “W3D3, energy bar, water, music not podcasts. Good(ish).”

In among the repetitions and intervals, I glimpsed something important. The teetering tower of worries that loomed overhead each morning: couldn’t I tackle it in the same incremental way? It was not the complete solution to the problem, but at least it was a start. A friend had told me that mixing running and walking is sometimes called Jeff ING, named after Jeff Galloway, one of the running coaches who popularised it. Today I jeff my way through many things in life.