On exercise. And on exercising our rights

Sarah Boseley, a fine Guardian journalist, recently shared an invaluable insight on the subject of the best way to protect health through exercise:

Incorporating physical activity into our everyday lives, from taking the stairs to holding “walkaround” meetings in the office, is more likely to protect us from heart disease and an early death than buying a gym membership, according to the author of a major new global study.

A sentiment that needed voicing.

I’ve often been struck by the number of people who apparently feel that buying a gym membership was sufficient to guarantee them good health. Actually using the membership? Three or four times in the first month, maybe. A couple in the next. But in the long term? Life’s too short, even when prolonged by exercise. It’s like War and Peace, isn’t it? How many people have bought the book and how many fewer have read it? How many holders of gym memberships go so far as to use them?

A long Russian novel and a passport to strenuous exercise
More honoured in the purchase than the use?

Still, it was good to read that walking around and using stairs is helpful. It was a relief, to tell the truth. Following my purchase of a fitbit last month, I’m still living under its tyranny. When it tells me to get up and walk a bit, or to do a few more steps to reach my daily goal, I find it hard to tell it to get lost and remember it’s only a bracelet and not my master. Of course, it would only provoke a wry smile, in me and perhaps in it too, if I did say anything like that – somewhere deep in whatever passes for a soul in a purely electronic device, it knows it’s my master.

So it’s a comfort to have it confirmed that what it’s making me do might help improve my health.

On the other hand, it’s always intriguing to see the message it sends me, from time to time, announcing that it has decided to “sync” with my phone. That gives me something of a syncing feeling, but not for what it's doing to my phone so much as for what it's doing to my language. 

That’s a fine verb, sync. An alternative, I assume, to swym, which wouldn't be appropriate for so notoriously a non-waterproof device as a fitbit. But what, I wonder, does the verb use as a past form? I feel it ought to be “sunc”. But that might lead to confusion: “I’ve sunc my fitbit” sounds like a cruel way to treat a device that dislikes water. Then again, maybe that’s exactly what I should do. Sinking the odious thing might be a blow for freedom, an insurgent act against unbearable tyranny. Perhaps under the slogan “Couch potatoes of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your fitbits". 

Chuck it in a swimming pool and escape its thrall? It might not be a bad move.

I could always buy a gym membership instead.

Keeping score in badminton. Better than counting lengths of a pool

One of the advantages of the weekend, is that the kind of exercise I take changes.

During the week, it’s swimming. But at the weekend it’s badminton. And that’s a huge improvement. Not just for the obvious reason that badminton doesn’t involve total immersion in cold water, or contact with any kind of water at all except perhaps in a bottle, but because badminton’s actually more fun. You score points in badminton – well, occasionally you lose them – so you can work out who’s won.

A winning point, as a shuttle dips over a net

It’s impossible to tell who the winner is in swimming, except that I have a sneaking feeling it’s the pool. Certainly, I always feel I come in second.

I suppose the reason I enjoy a game, as opposed to a sport, with a scoreline rather than mere endurance, is that I’m fundamentally competitive. That doesn’t mean that I expect to win or anything. I like to think I’m far too much of a realist for that. What I have is more a kind of potential competitiveness: the sense that in a competitive game, there is a chance that I might win.

After all, it does sometimes happen.

There’s a curious phenomenon that comes into play here. The same thing, I’m told, happens in childbirth. Clutching the little bundle of joy they’ve just received, and blissfully unaware of the 20 years of sheer ghastliness ahead, new mothers lose all memory of the pain they’ve just gone through to get that bundle of devilry into the world in the first place.

The same thing happens to me with badminton. I know I must have lost a whole bunch of games because I know, with my rational mind, that I played rather more games than I won.

Make that substantially more games than I won.

But the detail of any one of those defeats? Expunged from my mind as though they’d never happened. The victories, on the other hand, stay with me in glorious detail, to be replayed at leisure in my mind afterwards. For instance, in that wonderful bath into which I let my aching limbs subside.

With swimming, there’s no such joy. Just a vague sense of achievement. Though since I leave the pool by the same ladder that I entered it, even that is somewhat limited: all that effort to get back to place I started from? What was the point? Where’s the mileage in that?

It was like that in the days when I used to go running. However far I ran, I always ended up back at the car. Like one of those nightmares, or Alice in Through the Looking Glass: you run and run but you get nowhere.

So I’m enjoying the weekend. Badminton on Saturday. Badminton on Sunday. And some games I’ll win.

Then Monday, I’ll be back to swimming. And it’s a safe bet the pool will end up ahead. Again.

Badminton reduces the horror of exercise and adds a spark of Schadenfreude

Swimming’s a real super-sport. Exercises every part of you. Doesn’t put particular strain anywhere. But it has one huge intractable problem: it involves covering yourself in cold water.

True, it’s not that cold. However, my benchmark for water into which I might immerse myself is the kind you find in a bath. Swimming pools are a lot less alluring than that. And, in the winter, when it’s quite cold enough outside, the allure is still less marked.

So it was a great relief to opt for badminton this morning instead. You don’t get undressed for it. You quickly get warm. It doesn’t involve water, at least not until the post-game shower. And it’s fun: you even know who’s won, which is difficult with swimming (although in my case, I reckon it’s the pool that wins. Every time).

A joy in itself. And it can even deliver a lesson on life

The place where I played is an informal club, where you just turn up and play with anyone else who’s there. It has a few unwritten rules. If there are too many people for the courts, you take it in turn to sit out a game. If beginners show up, everyone plays with them at some stage or other, to make sure they’re fully involved.

Well, when I say ‘everyone’, I’m exaggerating slightly. There are always a few people who just know they play better than anyone else, and are therefore entitled to rise above the mere rules that govern the rest of us. They never leave the court. And they turn their back, in disdain, on the weaker players on whom it would be a waste of their precious time to squander their talents.

As well as being amusing in itself, this behaviour turns the badminton club into a microcosm of society. We live in a world where a small number of highly privileged people believe that they owe their positions to their superior talents – actually, we owe it to them to ensure they have those positions in recognition of their superior talents – and they know they’re entitled to ignore the rules if it suits them, or even to buy themselves governments that will change them on their behalf.

The sense of entitlement. The bane of modern society.

We had an entitled player this morning. The only time I saw him voluntarily leave the court was when two other men suggested that he make up a four with the three of us; he clearly wasn’t going to lower himself to playing with me so managed to persuade someone else to take his place.

Instead, he moved on to the court next door and started a game with three friends of mine. The one playing with him is an impressively powerful player, though not always as accurate as he’d like. When his strokes come off, they’re often unbeatable, but they don’t always come off. Still, overall he’s a strong player, an asset to have on your side and I’m happy to play with when I get the chance.

Now, here’s an interesting aspect of this state of affairs, and again it reflects the nature of society. The people who feel they belong to a self-appointed (perhaps I should say ‘self-anointed’) elite think themselves massively superior to all others, justifying for instance their having incomes 40 or 50 times higher than those at the bottom of the scale. The player this morning who felt himself so far above me, and who was playing with my friend, clearly regards his game as massively better than mine. In reality, it’s little more than marginally better than mine. 

OK, decidedly more than marginally better. But no more than that.

So I was delighted as I left the court and walked past his to hear the score. 14-1. To the other side. Despite the fact that he was playing with a good partner.

I was sorry for my friend but absolutely delighted for his partner. Couldn’t happen to a better guy, I felt.

Pure Schadenfreude, of course, pleasure in another’s misfortune, and therefore reprehensible. But its being reprehensible didn’t make it any less enjoyable. I left the club with a song in my heart and a spring in my step, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

Exercise: it's just a gamble

There’s something wonderful about being in a swimming pool at 7:00 in the morning.

At least, I’m assured there is. I haven’t actually found the wonder yet, and I’ve been looking for some weeks now. Compared to an alternative, like say a warm bed, or even a real bath – the kind you don’t have to swim in – the wonderful aspect isn’t always immediately obvious.

Wow. Such a long way. And so wet. Particularly daunting at 7:00.

It leaves you feeling good all day, they tell me. There’s probably some truth in that, though I find it also leaves me smelling of chlorine. I’ve even taken to showering twice but that smell, it just clings.

In any case, what’s the good of saying it feels better afterwards? You think that’s convincing? Isn’t it what they say about banging your head against a brick wall? Feels great when you stop?

There must be something else. It occurs to me that it may just be one of those age-old traditions, practised by flagellant monks or pilgrims whipping themselves on the way to Kerbala: mortifying the flesh to exalt the spirit. It works too: having spent a while in the pool at silly o’clock certainly leaves me filled with that emotion, right up there with the most glorious we enjoy, self-righteousness.

I imagine those monks and pilgrims inflicting pain on themselves feel just the same.

Of course, the reality is that we don’t do this terrible violence to bodies that would far rather be pampered, for the sake of our souls. We do it for the sake of the bodies themselves. I realise that on the face of it, that doesn’t seem to make much sense: you just have to realise it’s a gamble.

The assumption is that we’re in for pain, one way or another.

One option is that we get it now in small doses, out there running across rough country to get to places we’re not interested in reaching; in a gym lifting stupidly heavy weights off the ground only to put them down again (or even worse, driving a rowing machine: it’s bad enough in a boat, but the machines don’t even move, and would sink if you tried to get them to); or indulging in the form of exercise I now seem to have adopted, ploughing up and down a pool, only to reach the other end and discover it looks pretty well the same as the one you’ve just left, and exactly the same as it looked when you were there two lengths ago.

The other option is that we let the old joints and arteries go and get all our pain in a much bigger dose in a few years time.

So the bet is that all the little bits of pain now will add up to less than all the terrible pain we might avoid – or at least push back – later. It’s the gamble I’m taking.

But, I tell you what: if in a few years I find myself dying of some ghastly condition all this exercise should have prevented, I shall be most put out. And thinking, all the way to grave, ‘what the hell! Why didn’t I lie in late a bit more often – and eat more chocolate?’