So what, in the name of all that is holy, am I now doing running marathons? In my youth only mad people ran. Scary guys with glints in their eyes, sweaty vests and worn-out plimsolls. Well, not any more.
Now people routinely take up running to look good and lose weight. And it’s a good way to clear the mind. I started running for all those reasons but, mostly, I started running because I do not want to die.
I have seen too many people, men mostly, keeling over in their fifties, forties or even thirties of heart problems and I was keen not to join their ranks. Apart from smoking (which I managed to quit some years ago), being fat and unfit is the most dangerous lifestyle choice you can make. And in terms of increasing cardiovascular fitness and burning calories in the minimum time, nothing beats running.
Since the Seventies, when it was popularised by evangelists like the American Jim Fixx, running for fitness (and pleasure) has gone mainstream. In 1981, the first year of the London Marathon, 6,255 people crossed the finishing line. Last year the figure was 36,549. The Great North Run, a half marathon started by Tyneside long-distance legend Brendan Foster, attracted 12,000 for the first race in 1981. This year the figure was 54,000, making it the world’s biggest half-marathon.
Now just about every major city in the world hosts a marathon (Baghdad joined their ranks this year), and 10Ks, halves and full marathons happen on a weekly basis in Britain throughout the year. You can now sign up for races in Novosibirsk, Antarctica and the Sahara Desert. And running has, inevitably, spawned an industry of gurus and advisers.
Britain’s most famous running evangelist is Matt Roberts, “personal trainer to the stars” (a title applied so often I wonder if it is part of his name) and our Prime Minister. His new book on the subject is (mercifully) light on philosophy and strong on practical advice.
Roberts is lean, obviously hyper-fit and chiselled, and has a tendency to talk in Sportese. I am told, after a light jog along the Thames Embankment — he glides along the ground like a Dalek — that my “ITBs” need work, as does something called my gluteus medius (these, it turns out, are muscles in my leg and bottom respectively).
But he is focused, charming, persuasive and clearly determined, with a posh, Jamie Oliver sort of single-mindedness, to whip Britain off its collective backside. And despite my long-standing aversion to men in tracksuits telling me to keep my shoulders back, I can’t help but agree with everything he says.
“Twenty years ago, if you said at a party 'I’ve done a marathon’, everyone would be amazed,” he says, sipping a post-jog cup of tea (he limits his consumption to two cups a day, avoids coffee and orders his clients not to drink alcohol on five days of the week). “Now, everyone’s done one.” But this fitness revolution is, he explains, mostly a phenomenon of Britain’s urban elite. “People in London are lean,” he says. “But get in your car and drive for an hour in any direction and it is very different.”
The irony is that just as more of us than ever before are taking up running, spending thousands on expensive bicycles and entering triathlons, the other half of the nation is becoming dangerously fat and sedentary. For my own part, I am still hardly svelte — I love red wine and cheese too much for that — but at least, thanks to exercise and slightly more sensible eating, I am now merely pretty overweight rather than obese, as I was in the Fat Years.
At worst I was 18st, and although I have always cycled regularly, I could hardly be called fit. But after five or six years of gradually upping the pace on the treadmill and in the park, nearly three of those stones have been lost — I like to think of that as 21 bags of sugar. My blood pressure and “bad” cholesterol levels are lower, and my resting heart rate has dropped from 80-odd to the high sixties.
But it wasn’t until late 2009 that I thought about entering an actual race. To get this in context, the last competitive sporting event I had entered involved spoons and eggs. So that is how I found myself in June of last year, with a couple of running buddies, 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle in the Norwegian town of Tromsø doing my first half-marathon, run in the midnight sun.
It was fun. At the start, I was alarmed by a large contingent of wiry Scandinavians and disappointed not to see anybody dressed as a lobster, but even so I held my nerve and finished in a semi-respectable 1hr 57min. The first full marathon beckoned, duly ticked off in March, this time in Rome (a great way to see the city). I had heard horror stories of blisters and ''hitting walls’’, cramps and bleeding nipples. But I experienced none of these things – indeed at one point I was hugely gratified to plod past an angular fell-runner from the North who had screamed past me 10 miles before. He was lying on the ground wrapped in tinfoil. My time, a few minutes short of five hours, was nothing to boast about, but getting around certainly was.
So running is fun, and addictive – my next marathon is in Israel in March – and it has definitely helped me get in shape. But soon I will be in a minority. Around a quarter of Britain’s women are obese (the highest proportion in Europe), and men are catching up. Indeed, if you add in the people who are merely overweight (and the tiny minority of underweight individuals) probably less than a fifth of all British adults are in the “ideal weight” category, with BMIs between 20-25 (the Body-Mass Index is defined as your weight in kilos divided by the square of your height in metres).
Running is the perfect antidote to this. No skill or dexterity is required. Indeed, as a species we were born to run – humans are possibly the best runners in the animal kingdom. Not, of course, over short distances, but over 10, 20 even 50 miles a superfit adult human can outpace the swiftest gazelle. One of the most amazing things I’ve seen on television was a “persistence hunt” — an ancient technique still practised by the bushmen of the Kalahari. The footage shows a hunter literally running a kudu, a type of antelope, into the ground.
With my own kind of persistence, I found running turned from being a painful endurance test into something manageable – and even enjoyable – in a surprisingly short time. Running is time-efficient. Run for an hour at a steady pace and you can burn 1,000 calories; do this fairly regularly and you will increase your metabolic rate (effectively your overall fitness) by 15-25 per cent or more.
Exercise-sceptics (people who maintain weight-loss can only be achieved by dieting) claim that you need to hit the gym for hours to burn off one fairy cake’s worth of fat. This simply isn’t true, at least for running. Run four miles three times a week and, all else being equal, you will lose about a stone in four months. Run five miles four times a week and you can eat more or less what you want.
Best of all, you will probably live longer. Countless studies have shown the benefits of regular moderate-extreme exercise. As Roberts will confirm, a gentle walk every day really isn’t enough – you have to get “seriously out of breath” on a regular basis.
People who are fit have fewer heart attacks, age more slowly, live longer when diagnosed with cancer and remain free of dementia for longer. To take just one example, in 2008 the Journal of Neurology reported a University of Kansas finding that people who are physically fit have larger brains than those who do not exercise, and that high levels of fitness slow down the onset of Alzheimer’s.
Ah, but what about your knees, everyone asks? As a fairly tall, heavy bloke I worried about these allegedly fragile joints but so far (touch wood) they seem to have given no trouble. I am convinced “knees” has become a catch-all excuse. Roberts literally snorted with derision at their mention.
He blames the obesity epidemic, particularly among women, on complacency. “We’ve allowed ourselves to say 'you’re all right’ when you are not,” he says. Female commentators deride the profusion of ultra-thin models yet, as Roberts says, we are hardly in the grip of an anorexia epidemic.
When I was 14 I would have eaten my own feet rather than voluntarily make them run 26.2 miles. But if you want to live the good life in terms of decent claret, French cheese, steaks and so on, there is a price to be paid. One way of settling the debt is to live with – and die from – an ever-expanding waistline and chest pains. The other is a brisk, exhilarating jaunt along towpath or through forest. I’ve made my choice.
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