How I started running
The story of how I got off the sofa and finally started running as a complete beginner.
Below is an extract from my book ‘The Lazy Runner’. The book was written in 2012, but this first chapter takes us back to 2008 and my first tentative steps on the treadmill.
There are two words in the English language that fill me with dread and put me off exercise for a long time: gym induction. It was early 2008 and I’d decided months earlier that I needed to start exercising. I weighed up the options and concluded that joining an expensive gym metres from my office was the perfect balance of being too handy and too expensive for me to even consider not going. The gym induction, however, was the first barrier to starting my new guilt-based training plan. It’s like being the new kid at school, being paraded around the gym by an instructor and shown how all the various equipment works and, worse still, being made to use it while they look on assessing just how unfit you are.
Luckily, when the day and time of my gym induction arrived, the person inducting me had something more urgent to be doing. She looked me up and down, my small build fooling her, and she said: “You look pretty fit. You know how all this stuff works don’t you?” I then did something I’m not proud of: I lied like a teenage virgin who has been asked about their ‘first time’. “Yeah, of course. I’ve been a gym goer for, like, years. Since I was 10. Probably earlier. I was born in a gym. Literally. I love these machines. I could use them standing on my head. Obviously I won’t though, because of health and safety. I love the gym. I’d live in the gym if I could. I’d just curl up at night on one of those squishy things… yeah the exercise mats, of course I know what they are, I was checking you do.”
I hated the gym.
I was cut loose on the gym equipment, free to use the pulley thing, the steppy thing, the pushy thing, the bike (I knew that one) and the running thing to my heart’s content. Over the coming weeks I would conclude that the weights were always occupied by grunting men, the exercise bike was less comfy and less handy than the bike gathering dust in my own garage, and the cross trainer was a futile activity that had no perceivable use in the real world. The only machine I had any interest in was the treadmill. Unlike the cross trainer, the treadmill could have tangible benefits for me outside the four walls of the gym. If I could learn to run a mile on the treadmill I could, presumably, run a mile on the road and this might be useful in situations where I had to run away from someone or to the shop before it closed. Never again would I miss a bus or last orders because I’d be running there. This was where running started to seem like a good idea: in a gym in central London during my lunch break. There was only one problem: I was rubbish at running.
Apart from those annoying people who could run pretty much as soon as they could walk and that always looked forward to the annual school sports day with the excitement that most of us save for Christmas or a pint at the end of a long week, everyone sucks at running when they first start. But I didn’t know this when I first started and I though that I was the only person finding it hard. I wasn’t a natural runner. I skived off school on school sports days. I skived off PE and I couldn't run one lap of the running track without collapsing with a stitch. I also hated the sporty kids because, while me and my frizzy ginger hair and sparrow legs got laughed at, they were applauded. Most of the first 26 years of my life were spent avoiding exercise.
Joining the gym in 2008 was my second attempt at starting running. On my first attempt, shortly after finishing university, I'd slowly worked my way up to the giddy heights of being able to run 1KM without stopping before I decided that early retirement was the next logical step for my running career. So, when I came out of retirement in 2008 to give it another shot, the running world was not worried.
This is where I should have thought about reading up on running or perhaps gone to a running shop for some advice. At the very least, I should have come clean about my athletic inability and asked the gym instructor some questions. But none of these things happened. The short story is that I tried to run too far, too fast, too soon in trainers that were too small and I got injured. But, of course, you’re here for the long version of the story.
How it all began
My early training plan consisted of running as far as I could at a number on the treadmill that didn’t seem feeble in comparison to the person on the treadmill next to me, and then collapsing in a big heap. The next time I went to the gym I’d try to run further. This is not the best way to avoid injuring yourself.
I still have my notebook in which I recorded my early training. The highlight of my first month of gym membership was that I was able to run for five minutes non-stop. It seemed like a huge achievement for me at the time – and it was. But if I try something new, I want to be good at it straight away – which is why I usually give up after a few attempts. I wanted results. I wanted to see big numbers on the display of the treadmill rather than the 1.5KM I was capable of in the early days. So after not very long I ignored conventional wisdom about ‘building up gradually’ and tried running as long as I could, as hard as I could. I gave myself the target of running non-stop for 10 minutes before the end of May and on 19 May I achieved my goal with much panting and a very painful stitch.
In June I gave myself the target of upping this to 15 minutes of non-stop running and just five days into the month I managed it. All was going well, perhaps too well and disaster couldn't be far off. A week or so later I got a cold and sore throat, and with this came the perfect excuse to avoid the gym. I'd heard all the stories of stupidly fit athletes who exercised with a cold and dropped down dead – I wasn't taking any chances. Staying on the sofa, watching Hollyoaks and eating Kit Kats seemed like far and away the best option.
After two weeks of skiving off the gym (it's so much easier when you don't have to forge a note from your mum) I was back and anticipating another PB. But no, my two-week break had put me back and I was struggling to get 8 minutes on the clock. It took another month of trying to get back up to my previous record of 15 minutes running, but then I had a breakthrough: 20 minutes non-stop running and a distance of 3.6KM! I felt like an Olympian.
I’ve now run 21 marathons, the fastest I ran in 3 hours 30 minutes and in preparation for a marathon I will run 20 miles through the streets of London by myself. Did I think, when I first started running that either of those things would ever happen? Probably not. But I did want them to. And here's the thing I learnt about myself: I'm a stubborn little git and stubbornness trumps over impatience. Stubbornness is what got me from zero to 3.6KM. Stubbornness is what gets me through 20 lonely, painful miles. It was stubbornness that made me persevere with the gym, even though it seemed to dislike me as much as I hated it and even though there was somewhere more interested that I could be, like at home on the sofa, at the cinema with friends or pretty much anywhere but on the treadmill. But this time I wouldn’t quit.
Get The Lazy Runner on Amazon.
THIS WEEK’S NUDGE…
Being a beginner again.
I haven’t read the chapter above in several years but reading it now reminds me of what it was like to be a beginner - how exposed I felt and how I compared myself constantly to other runners and where I wanted to get to. Nevertheless, something made me carry on.
There are other things I’ve been a beginner at again since then: swimming and strength training are just two, and it takes a lot of courage to show up at something you’re not good at.
Is there something you’ve been putting off trying (fitness or non-fitness related) because you know you won’t be very good at it, you won’t know anyone there, or any number of reasons? Give yourself permission to be a beginner. What’s the worst that could happen?