An Invite

After my last session with the General he said he was having a gathering at his house for the rugby and I was invited. To be honest I had always figured he lived in the gym, relying only on 45 minutes of a sleep a night. The obvious worry is that I am going to arrive at his house and instead of watching the rugby he is going to open the door with ‘April Fools, now do 500 situps.’ I was imagining being belittled in front of his housemates when suddenly I remembered his parting words: ‘Bring meat.’ My heart sank. How much meat should I take? Was he going to be sharing the meat with me? A man his size could quite easily polish off a fully-grown camel in one sitting.

On the one hand if I am supplying meat for the whole party and in a ploy to show him how committed I am to my diet I arrive with barely enough meat to feed a pair of spinsters, there is a pretty good chance that he and his friends will just eat me. On the other hand if I assume I am feeding everyone and I charter a lorry to bring in a bevvy of carcasses from a nearby farm, and I am in fact eating alone… well needless to say the look of disgust on his face would be fairly prevalent.

Maybe I should phone him and say that I am unwell and unable to make it. Though do I really want to waste that excuse on a barbeque rather than one of his trademark sessions of degradation? In the end I decided that the decent thing to do is to go to the barbeque, so I will attend. I have been trying to imagine the General in his home enviroment but I cannot imagine him in anything other than his gym gear, a look of disgust permanently furnishing his face. At this point I will be happy to just survive the whole day.

Oats and such

The General has been speaking to me a lot about diet recently. I understand his thoughts, after all it is going to be pretty hard to do a marathon if I weigh the same as a bi-plane. We sat down for half an hour in the gym this afternoon to discuss what I should be eating, and, rather vocally, what I shouldn’t be eating. He made a list of the sort of foods I should be seeking out, then made a menu of portions and amounts of food. It’s difficult to put into perspective how much a handful of oats is. I am sure nobody speaks of handfuls of oats outside petting zoos, but it is the only measurement the General uses. As a great fan of fast food, my measurements were usually done by people behind the counter.

When I settled down for my first meal of oats I was immediately disheartened to note I was not allowed very much. Not only was I being limited to the staple diet of the homeless and toothless, but I was also being forced to dine on an outrageously small amount of food. The oats sit at the bottom of the bowl; they just seem so pathetically insignificant. I haven’t eaten like this since I was being weaned off breast milk.

Lunch is where I am allowed to pig out; the General has given me the all-clear to have two handfuls of food during lunch. I can also have meat at lunch, but once again the suggested menu is weighted heavily towards the goodness of vegetables and the portions of a toddler. Dinner is soup. Powdered soup. Something I once ‘ate’ as a novel way to achieve warmth was now a meal in its entirety. Not to worry though, if I did become hungry after dinner I was allowed to gorge to capacity on celery or cucumber (two items so full of water, it’s a wonder they don’t just sell them in bottles).

I am starting to wonder if it is such a good idea to live off such little food when the General is on the verge of dropping me in a remote location and telling me to sprint the whole way back. I have taken his advice, hopefully it doesnt lead to malnutrition and dizzy spells.

Getting undone by a lifeless tyre

This morning I had a rather disappointing verbal exchange with the General when I was in the car park outside the gym. I was delighted when the General told me that we would be training outside the gym as I took it to mean that I was getting close to actually training inside the gym, but he coldly informed me that our previous sessions had told him that it was best to train in an area that was easily accessible to ambulances.

 

As it transpires, the gentleman who owns the gym where the General works is a big fan of those Strongman competitions and he keeps a few artefacts behind the gym that can be used for training. Though I’m sure he would admit that they were intended solely for those actually training to compete in the Strongman events, not for people training to avoid having to go through life with a heart that used to belong to a monkey. So there I was, standing in the car park of the gym, in front of a tyre. “You have lifted a few tractor tyres in your day, haven’t you?” the General enquired. Of course. Thousands. I’m quite the farmhand.

 

“No.” I replied, meekly, hoping that the answer would be enough to discourage him from his course. Naturally, it did not, and the General moved swiftly to exhibit the generally preferred method for lifting and flipping tractor tyres. He lifted the tyre with such force that it left the ground completely, and flipped without any further help, landing with a mighty clatter as it eventually settled. It didn’t look right seeing him negotiate the weight of a farm tyre with less effort than I exert stirring my tea. Inspired, I moved into position and grabbed the bottom of the tyre. My immediate thoughts were that gravity had a pretty solid working relationship with the tyre, and would probably be putting in a large amount of resistance to my efforts. True to form, my first lift (coupled with the infamous Strongman manly scream) was a little over 3 inches, at which point I was forced to stop.

 

I had managed a height so embarrassingly small that the tyre didn’t even make a noise when I let go, just the pathetic whisper of escaped air.

 

I stepped back, hoping to find a reason why the majority of the tyre remained motionless; finding nothing, I kicked the tyre. The General started to moan about body position and harnessing my efforts but the blood had rushed to my head during my initial attempt and I was struggling to hear him through the dull thump in my ear drums. Confident I could do no worse; I took position and started to lift the tyre. To my utter astonishment, the tyre responded to my efforts, this body position business had some merit! The penny dropped. I wasn’t fat because of fast food and a couch lifestyle – I was fat because of body position. Body position was also to blame for my late night snacking and recurring heart murmur.

 

I got the tyre up to about knee height and the shakes started. Determined to impress the General I carried on lifting, reaching chest height then, amazingly, head height. At this point I had to lean the tyre on my face while I repositioned my hands. At that exact same moment, the General was called from inside the gym and he jogged off. My last memory was hearing his departing footsteps as I triumphantly pushed the tyre away from my body.

 

All other accounts of what happened next where provided by a gentleman watching me from the window.

 

According to said gentleman, after pushing the tyre away from my body, I fell slightly forward. When the top of the tyre hit the ground, the bottom of the tyre started to bounce upwards. At the precise time that the bottom of the tyre was on its way up, my chin was pioneering my face’s downward journey. Soon thereafter, according to reports, the tyre and my chin came to a point where they were blocking each others’ path and arrived at a staggering collision, causing my head to snap back and subsequently knock me unconscious. The report concluded that my forward momentum had ensured that I arrived inside the tyre, face in the tar, legs sticking out.

 

Needless to say my rather unfortunate resultant posture had drawn quite a crowd by the time I awoke from my involuntary slumber. I was brought round by the sound of uproarious laughter, with the star witness revelling in his newfound role as storyteller and comic. When I opened my eyes, I found the General to be laughing the loudest and pointing at me. Here was a man I was paying by the hour, and I hadn’t even drawn an hour’s worth of work from him by the time the first week was over. Granted that was mostly my fault, but I felt it a slight insult that he was taking photos of me while I was arched, helplessly breathing in gravel inside the tyre.

The Hill of Death (hereafter referred to as ‘the hill’)

I awoke on Day 2 of my training feeling like I’d fought all 6 years of the Second World War. The General had asked me to meet him in the Notting Hill area for our second training session, an ominous sign. Each day we trained we seemed to be getting further away from the gym. I was convinced that I was being led to my cliff-side death by the Pied Piper of exercise. I arrived to find the General on an intersection, telling me that we were to be doing hills. Now, Notting Hill hasn’t been named after its grand, marching plateaus that stretch to the very edges of the city. It has been named after hills that put the White Cliffs of Dover to shame.

The General pointed to a particular hill that was to be my death; I can confidently inform you that I have abseiled off flatter surfaces. The Hill kept rising majestically to the heavens and at the top I could make out the outline of some houses. I’m not sure who occupies those houses, but they certainly don’t live off oxygen because there isn’t any up there. The General motioned for us to start power-walking up the hill. I casually suggested that it would be impolite to leave without our Sherpa, but the General was already on his way up. He told me that it wouldn’t be too bad a walk as people used this hill as a cut-through all the time.

A cut-though! To what? The tip of Everest? The International Space Station?

Defeated, I joined him on the ascent. As was the case in the previous day’s training, the General tried to make conversation during the early parts of course. I cursed myself for not suggesting earlier that he end this charade as I was in no position to waste precious oxygen on anything other than staying alive – especially at this altitude. We continued up the hill and I started to feel dizzy (probably vertigo) but stayed the course. I looked up to see that the houses at the top appeared no closer. Our walk up the hill continued and time blurred as I slipped in and out of consciousness. When we were about half way up, the General stopped and said it was time to take a break. I told him that I hadn’t brought a tent but this seemed as good a place as any to set up base camp for our overnight stay.

The General turned around to see me crawling on all fours up the hill, and laughed, thinking that I was doing it for comic effect. I wasn’t. I was doing it because every time I took a step it felt like someone had thrown acid on my thighs and the pain had become rather unbearable over the past half hour. The General finally took the hint when he turned to find me face down in the pavement, not moving.

I couldn’t move any part of my body and so started to verbalise my last will and testament to The General, telling him with tears in my eyes that in the event of my obviously impending death, he could keep myrunning shoes as a memento.

The General threw me over his shoulder and started to head back down the hill. While I was trying hard not to vomit with each of his steps I realised the growing trend of how my sessions with The General were ending. I looked up at the hill, nodding in appreciation of the size of it and admitting that it would have slain even the most hardened of travellers. At that point we were passed by a woman on her way up the hill. Pushing a pram. Whistling.

Nature’s gymnasium

Today was day one of my training and I waited outside the gym for the General, praying that he would not arrive due to any amount of natural disasters. Sickeningly, he arrived precisely on time. I greeted him and started to walk inside but was stopped short to be told that I would have to train outside. Apparently I had to earn the right to train in the gym.

So we made our way to the park next to the gym. He explained that he wanted to get an idea of my level of fitness, to which I replied that I had the lungs of a toddler and the heart of a retired air traffic controller. But he called my bluff and we started with some situps.

After about 4 situps I started to think I had been exaggerating my lack of fitness this whole time; I was fine, I could go on forever!

Well, I could go to ten because that’s when I started to wheeze with each breath. By fifteen, my lungs were experiencing an oxygen level where demand far outweighed supply and after eighteen I fell to the floor, exhausted. I would have stayed there too if the General hadn’t demanded that I start doing pushups. He demonstrated the perfect pushup, with a straight line from shoulder to foot, doing three for good measure. I took the position but knew immediately that my technique was flawed. I was being told as much, but knew I couldn’t even hold up my own body weight that way, never mind push up and down on it.

Rather than having a straight back, I had pushed my bum so far in the air that it was almost at eye level with the General and my body had formed a pyramid shape. I could hear the General sighing, but I decided to block out his judgement. I had my pride and at the very least I was going to complete 1 pushup, regardless of poor technique. Sadly my Eiffel Tower approach did nothing to help, as I couldn’t even scare up a single pushup, not even a bad one. Every time I lowered myself my arms would begin to shake violently, then eventually give out and end with my face in the ground. After 5 minutes of this humiliating ritual I was relieved to hear The General suggest I stop trying. I stood up and started to mutter an excuse about the ground not being even, but he motioned for me to shut up and told me it was time to ‘hit the streets’.

I was hoping that ‘hit the streets’ was gym lingo for ‘lets sit down and reflect on events’ but it was not to be. So The General and I went for a jog.

I got into stride, trying to figure out how I was sweating so much from doing precisely no pushups. The General was trying to chat to me at the beginning of the jog but by this time I was already too out of breath to respond, and we weren’t even out of eyeshot of the gym. I looked up to The General to see if he too was feeling the burn but he showed absolutely no difference from when we were started – he looked like he could keep going until he hit Edinburgh. This was a disaster. I had to make the decision to put my pride aside and just stop running.

The General gave me a puzzled look as I collapsed on the pavement. I apologised to him, repeatedly, and offered to pay for a taxi home. He frowned and said he would be fine walking all 500 metres back to the gym. And so ended day 1 of my training; being given a piggyback to the gym. The entire session had lasted a little over 15 minutes and I had to sleep in my car before heading home.

Presentation before preparation

Having decided that I will be running the London Marathon next year, I need to buy some kit to enable me to look good while I do it. Looking good is half the battle. There was always one idiot at school who forgot his running shoes and had to run in his school shoes, though this did not stop said idiot from cruising past me in every event. Nevertheless, if I look like someone who runs marathons and I collapse after 1 kilometre people will assume I tried to run while suffering from swine flu rather than figuring that 1 kilometre was the furthest I could run if it wasn’t downhill.

This morning I drove to the local sporting shop to get some gear. The boy helping me to pick out my weaponry was a youngster of no more than 14, but he knew a lot about running. He started asking me a few questions regarding my training regime.

As a fully-grown adult, I had to stand in front of this spotty know-it-all and admit to him that I hadn’t broken into a sprint in almost a decade.

He laughed and told me that any exercise counted, anything over 100 metres was worth mentioning. I honestly had no recollection of running consistently over 100 metres and probably wouldn’t be in the future unless being chased by an escaped leopard. So I simply shrugged my shoulders and told him that I would be starting from scratch. He looked at me with genuine concern and said it was best if I spoke to an expert about my training so I would know what I was doing. I could hardly see the point in paying somebody £50 an hour to tell me that I am fat and slow, but perhaps his concern was well placed. Next stop, find a personal trainer.

I arrived at the gym with a sense of pride. I have often decided to join the gym but my attempts to join usually resulted in me circling the gym for an hour then driving home (and then lying to people by telling them that I had been to the gym). I walked in to find someone who could train me into contention to win the marathon in a year’s time. The front desk pointed me in the direction of one of the trainers. I walked to his section to find a grizzly man as wide as he was tall.

He had arms the size of fully-laden oil drums and, if called upon, could easily benchpress my immediate family.

His nickname around the gym – the General. His first question was how many times a week I did exercise. My heart began to race (ironically); it’s hard to know what constitutes as exercise when you are out of breath climbing a flight of stairs and sweat from the hardship of changing a light bulb. I decided to be honest with the General and told him that I hadn’t done any exercise since the turn of the century. He looked at me as though I had just ordered the bombing of Hiroshima.

At that moment, standing there, I found myself apologising for my ten years of laziness to a man I had met not 30 seconds earlier. He agreed to train me on the basis that I was to eat right and stop drinking. I agreed and he left, thankfully fast enough not to hear me gently weeping. It’s a year until the marathon and already I am sick to my stomach.

The start of a terrible thing

I have decided to run the London Marathon next year. It’s not an ultra marathon, just one of those ‘manageable’, 42km ones. People will be quite surprised about this, because nobody has seen me move with any real purpose outside a 5 metre radius of the fridge. I think it’s time though. I came to this drastic crossroad after a harsh look in the mirror: I was watching this year’s marathon on tv on Saturday afternoon. The only reason I was watching the marathon is because the previous week my remote had broken and I had taken to watching just one channel all day rather than endure the eight-foot walk to the tv to make a change.

After an hour of watching people running, constantly wrestling with the idea of getting up to change the channel, I finally relented and decided that I no longer wanted to watch people run on a road. It was at this moment that I made the decision to run the marathon – I watched a man with no legs finishing it.

At the very point that this man crossed the line, having run 42 kilometres on fake limbs, I was outstretched on the couch trying to use a broom to change the channel to spare myself the journey to the tv.

At school I was never athletic. Whenever our PE teacher announced that we were to do any sort of running I would feign an injury. By the end of school I had invented so many breaks and fractures in my legs that the teacher must have thought I had a calcium deficiency. Sadly when athletics season rolled around, we were all expected to try out for every event, a ploy no doubt designed for the entertainment of the teachers as they observed the ungainly huffing around the track. Year after year I would line up to ‘try out’ for the 100m dash, and every year I suffered the humiliation of just galloping over the halfway mark as my classmates finished, then they would all turn and observe me finish, clutching my stitch and sweating profusely.

Then there was hurdles. I never had much time to gain momentum in the hurdles as I was found to crash into each and every one; the teacher finally relenting and allowing me to navigate around the hurdles in order to make room for the juniors to run. Long jump was particularly trying – I would be treated to sarcastic cheering and rapturous applause every time I actually managed to make it into the sandpit, rather than collapsing in front of it. Needless to say high jump was a series of unsightly horizontal dives that usually ended in me watching the bar as I sailed under it.

I once tried the scissor kick, deeming my technique to be the reason I wasn’t getting any height. It wasn’t my technique, and my parents had to buy the school a new high jump bar.

So knowing this about myself, I was surprised that I had been jolted into signing up for a marathon, almost as though I didn’t remember cross country trials where we were required to run 6 laps around the track, and I had been overlapped 4 times by the eventual winner.

But after some careful thought, I realised that the idea of completing a marathon would be a good idea, in order to accomplish something significant in my adult life. You always get those hippies at dinner parties who have scaled a mountain or swum the length of an ocean; this would be my thing. Plus, a little exercise would do me some good, and also ensure that when I eventually die they wont have to cut a hole in the side of the house to get me out.