Finding that fit feel
It’s one thing to be active. Quite another to be fit. Or at least to feel fit. Fitness is an elusive thing to measure. Over a lifetime (mostly) of exercise and sport, when I look back, there are few times when I actually felt fit. But when I think about it, I’m not even sure what the definition is.
There have been times when I’ve thought that fitness was a reflection of numbers on a set of scales. It’s easy, right?
We look at our weight and think, gee, I must be unfit.
That’s a path to selfdestruction. Weight is a crude and unhelpful measure – skinny most certainly does not necessarily equal fit, and the opposite is just as true.
So where do we find the answer?
Those times when I’ve thought, ‘‘Oh, wow, I feel fit’’, have been fleeting.
I vividly recall one summer when I’d been training with my friend, Shaun, for an upcoming race.
We had trained hard. Sometimes training for an event doesn’t go so well, with injuries or other interruptions getting in the way. But this summer had been solid.
And on this particular morning, not long before race day, we set off up a long, grinding climb in the forest, a 3km trek up to a trig.
Halfway up, you reach a part of the track that looks like the peak of the hill, lulling you into a false belief that you’ve reached the top, only to be shattered when you turn the next corner and see, no, you’ve still got away to go.
It can often slow you to a walk, driven on only by the promise of the spectacular views you get at the top, all the way to Auckland city and the Waitemata¯ Harbour.
But on this particular day, our hearts and lungs were like super-efficient, turbo-charged engines.
Our legs pushed hard, past the fake peak, driving us on faster and faster all the way to the rewarding vista, never tempting us to walk.
If I could bottle that feeling, I would. It’s a feeling that every part of my bodywas moving like it should, the oxygen-carrying blood zipping to the muscles effortlessly.
But as satisfying as that run was, it’s only one measure of fitness, right?
As I’ve got older, I’ve realised that running on its own is not the only way I should seek to improve my fitness.
For years, I tried to build other activities into my exercise regime. But as weird as it is to say – I know I’m in aminority here – my problem was that I loved running too much.
I should stretch – hmmmm, but isn’t that just eating into running time?
I should go to the gym – hmmmm, but isn’t that just a day when I can’t go for a run?
I should ride my bike sometimes instead – hmmmm, but it takes so long, compared to going for a run.
The onlyway to get better at running was to run, I firmly believed.
Recently, though, I realised how wrong that thinking was. I opened up an old book, one I’ve had since I was a kid. It’s Running with Lydiard, by Arthur Lydiard and Garth Gilmour.
Lydiard is the legendary New Zealand running coach, who not only produced Olympic champions including Sir Peter Snell and Sir Murray Halberg, but also triggered the global jogging explosion in the 1970s.
The book is full of advice about running, and training schedules for various distances – the pencil markings in the book are evidence they’ve been my guides for decades.
What I’d never really taken in is that, in the middle, Lydiard encourages stretching, and gives advice on weight-training (complete with black-and-white photos of an unnamed Venezuelan Olympian demonstrating suitable lifting exercises).
I was so myopic about running, I’d ignored those.
In the past two years, I’ve made a conscious effort to include some other exercises alongside running.
I’ve discovered stretching is not as evil as I thought it was; and that riding my bike is sometimes a good alternative, a way to spin my legs and work my heart without the stresses of running.
And I even started going to the gym, a couple of times a week. I won’t say it’s easy – for so long it was so foreign. But I enjoy it, and the gym I go to has great camaraderie, a supportive culture and is far from the image I had of pumped-up and Lycraclad posers.
It’s helped me find new ways of striving for fitness – strength and flexibility, both challenges for me.
So I guess fitness isn’t a measure of one thing after all. Most of all, to me, it’s a feeling, and it’s something that can be achieved various ways.
The most important thing is to try.
Eugene Bingham and
Matt Rayment are hosts of a trail running podcast, Dirt Church Radio. Learn more at dirtchurch radio.com or get in touch via email dirtchurchradio@gmail. com