So, imagine that, the old fat-knacker has been hauled out of retirement again. Yup, the FT have asked me, for a second time, to quit the quietude of my sporting dotage, to dust off my training shoes, find some er... sporting apparel, forget my many, many injuries, and get out there again. You'd have thought they might find some young buck instead, but apparently they like my (grunting) 'view from the ground'...
This time it’s for IGO W114, a multisport event held in Montana. Cycling, swimming, paddling and mountain running. Four days of it. The story will run in How to Spend it magazine, towards the end of the year apparently. But before that I have decided to enter the Coast to Coast, an adventure race, the one in Scotland rather than the Coast to Coast in New Zealand, though I wouldn't mind having a go at the one in New Zealand as well, actually...
And you can imagine, as someone behind a site called A Life of Adventure, I’m as up for a challenge as much as any person. It’s just that… well… it has been a while, and entering any of these events means getting fit... And I’m a fully paid-up lard-bucket, with the complexion of a Cumberland sausage, and only too happy prostrate on the sofa. I haven’t been that sort of fit for an alarmingly long time.
Oh, I have cycled a bit. It keeps the leg muscles in trim and enables a certain aerobic fitness. In fact, just last year the FT sent me out on one of the cycling world’s most hideous challenges, Den Store Styrkeproven from Trondheim to Oslo. You can read more of the rather painful result here. But cycling hardly keeps the weight off. And anyway, some rather more rigorous training will be involved. I’m going to have to start running again…
So, the hunt for my running shoes…. I learn from her ladyship that they were consigned to the garden shed long ago. I march out into the garden, across our postage stamp-sized lawn. Just opening the shed door causes an avalanche … of garden implements, bicycles, plant pots and skittering packets of seeds. Does everyone else in this country have as much extraneous stuff? Eventually I locate my trainers under a rake behind a bag of charcoal. And there, happily installed, I also find a family of field mice, four furry rodents in bucolic bliss, lolling on their backs and munching lazily on stalks of grass. They look at me doubtfully.
The four furry rodents look at me, doubtfully. 'Who are you kidding...?'
I'm ruthless, I am, so I cast the little fellers out. They scurry off, but one pauses to look back, with an expression of 'Who are you kidding, mate?' Cho! I'm determined, too. Slap go the trainer soles against one another, releasing a cloud of dust and mousey detritus. Next I have to struggle back out of the shed, picking my way past the paint-pots, shears and secateurs. Momentarily I am pinned by the old 1980s rowing machine, which is so strung with cob-webs I could start a silk-farm. It might feel, a bit like Buzz Lightyear, that it has been cruelly rejected, consigned to a cob-webbed oblivion. It has no idea what’s coming…
So Running… yes, running… I approach it with some trepidation. I say this because it'll be fifteen years since the wobble and thump of my 90 kilos became so alarming that I concluded it would affect my joints, and that therefore I should stop running and take up cycling instead. (Oh, all right, since it became too much like hard work and the sofa too inviting.)
So, the fat-knacker's repose is at an end (as is the field mice's, as it happens). And I’ll be out there taking exercise once more...
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