I Like The Way You Move
If you are someone who does not like to exercise, here is my twofold easing in solution for a happier, healthier relationship to movement.
I love to move.
I love dancing. I love walking. I love running. I love yoga. I love taking the stairs two at a time. Nine times out of ten I’ll take the left-hand side climb on an escalator too. I love the feeling of tired muscles when they’ve worked hard and moved you places. I love that feeling you get when you’ve taken on a steep incline, like your chest is going to burst.
But I haven’t always.
When we were selling our family home I was tasked with sorting through a lot of my old stuff - toys, books, school reports. I found a small red exercise book, about half the height and depth of a regular one, a littler book for a littler person. ‘Friday Book, Year 5’ was scrawled across the front in trying-ever-so-hard childish font. Inside, there were faint horizontal grey lines, widely spaced across the bottom half of the page, with the top half left blank for drawings. As far as I could tell, the left hand page was for me to fill in, the right hand page was for parents and teachers. The purpose of the book was to keep a record of each week at school. I would fill in my side and the adults the other, to review and comment on whatever it was I was scribbling about.
I settled in against the boxes and bulging black sacks full of stuffed animals and started reading. There were stories about day trips, stories about what I was enjoying learning and one story towards the very end of the book that really leapt out, it was about Sports Day. I went into triumphant detail about my many victories, some of them even over the boys in my class which I particularly revelled in, along with the mention of one final event where I came second, which somewhat pleasingly I was still more than happy with. There were detailed pictures sketched above, thick awkwardly drawn pencilled outlines smudged over with mis-matched colours - hurdles, long jumps, three-legged races. I found myself hunched forward, frowning. I called to my mum. I handed the book over to her as I asked through lips sneering into a half-laugh if she remembered this, if it was real. Her own space on the right hand side hadn’t been filled in — or rather my inaccurate pictures had spilled over into that section and left no room for her to write.
At this point in my life I was in a particularly intense Just Do It phase of exercising. I was an avid runner, I would casually do a half marathon for my own pleasure on a Saturday afternoon and at speed, I would practise hot yoga pretty much every day without even really thinking about it, I would walk the length and breadth of Hampstead Heath most weekends (I lived not far from there at the time), I attended as many gym classes as I could fit in in amongst all that too but as far as my memory served, these were new passions, born of adulthood and growing up. As a child I had never enjoyed sports, any sports. I faked notes to get out of PE, I would forget my gym kit on purpose, I had regular nightmares about being forced to play netball with the girls in my year for whom bullying was the real sport.
My mother glanced at the book then handed it back to me with a kindly eye-roll of nonchalance, not knowing what all the fuss was about and said yes, of course it was real. She left the room as I sat there dumbfounded, surrounded by the phantoms of my former self, incredulous. Like I’d just found myself in an episode of Severance.