Wellness on ‘Wall Street’
Ironman training at dawn, HIIT classes at lunch... the finance sector is in thrall to a new kind of addiction, says Rachel Heng
It is the middle of the night on July 26 2014, and I am traipsing through the West Sussex countryside by the weak light of my headlamp. It is nearly midnight, and I have now been walking since six in the morning, more or less non-stop. My three team-mates and I were doing Oxfam’s 100km Trailwalker event. We’d started the day exuberant, filled with adrenalin and a hearty serving of bacon and eggs. It had been a beautiful morning, and we had woken to a perfectly clear sky and the rolling hills saturated with sunshine. That idyllic morning had been 18 hours and 70km ago. The remaining 30km would take another six hours or so, an amount of time that my exhausted mind couldn’t bear to contemplate.
I’d lost track of time and my blisters. The pain seemed to come from everywhere at once, my knees creaked and burned, and the dull ache that had settled into my lower back was spreading upwards. My fingers had become swollen and numb while my teammate’s toenail was in the process of falling off. Why had I chosen to put myself through it? The four of us were taking on this challenge in support of the Gurkha Welfare Trust. We had raised almost £7,000 but, deep down, I knew it was not charitable feelings that had made me participate in this back-breaking challenge.
This was the second long-distance event I had done so far that year. As I took step after leaden step, practically delirious from the effort, I had plenty of time to reflect upon what had led me to this point.
I had graduated from Columbia University a year before, and started my new finance job in London when an annual health check-up found that I had high cholesterol and low muscle mass. Not great news, considering I was only in my early 20s and had a family history of diabetes and heart disease. “I have high cholesterol! Can you believe it?” I told my colleagues, when I got back to the office. “It’s because you eat all those crisps, and don’t exercise,” they said.
That was the thing about finance. Once, working in the City was a byword for a Wolf of Wall Street of excess; today, it is still about extremes, but the drug-fuelled all-nighters have been replaced by something quite different. The ultimate badge of honour is no longer a blowout after an 80-hour working week, but to work those gruelling hours while maintaining the fitness regime of an Olympic athlete. Marathons, iron mans and Arctic treks are all par for the course; getting up at 5am for sessions with a personal trainer is common, and proteinpacked highperformance diets the norm. The perfectionist hedonist has been replaced by the clean living perfectionist whose obsession with wellness is seen as an antidote to burn-out. Little do they realise, it is probably contributing to it.
In this turbo-charged atmosphere of health mania, my high cholesterol result felt like a personal failure. It wasn’t long before I embarked on my own extreme regime.
When I started, I was barely able to run 2km without giving up. Within a few months, I was running 5km in half an hour. My daily routine was rigid: alarm set for six, run before work, and a fitness class at lunch. The rush of wellbeing that came with each yoga class or HIIT session at the gym was undeniable. As well as gaining a feeling of purpose while working towards a new, stronger self, I felt energised in a way that I never had done.
There was more to it, of course, than just high cholesterol. I was deeply lonely. I was in a high-pressure corporate job that involved working late nights and weekends, in a very competitive industry that I wasn’t sure that I was cut out for. This was at odds with my recent near-utopian lifestyle of being a student in the liberal arts, where I had spent my days lounging on lawns reading French and Russian novels.
Amid all of this change and loneliness, my exercise regime quickly became a life raft that I clung to. Exercise became a way of controlling my environment, of giving a shape and purpose to my life. It kept my mind off deeper, uncomfortable existential questions.
I saw this in others, too: from the executives who did endless marathons, to the assistants who attended lunchtime spin class religiously. In the way our predecessors would escape into late-night partying and drugs, we had become addicted to the dopamine hit and adrenalin rush of our workouts.
This is all clear to me now but, back then, how could “getting healthy” be a problem? My cholesterol had gone back down to a normal level within a year, and my taut stomach and toned arms told their own story. When my colleagues asked if I wanted to sign up for a 100km walk, of course I wasn’t going to say no.
Yet, somewhere around the 40km mark, my Achilles tendon became inflamed. I began popping ibuprofen, one at each checkpoint, and then two. I took a total of 10 tablets during the course of the whole walk but, eventually, the pills stopped being effective and I was left with the pain. Stubborn as always, I finished the race, but my busted Achilles would have longer-term ramifications.
When the doctor told me I should lay off all vigorous exercise for at least a year, I panicked. What would I do? What else was there to focus my energies on? Because it was a doctor telling me, I managed to calm down. I was not lazy or undisciplined, I was injured! I had been told, specifically, not to exercise, by the very same doctor who had, in grave tones, pronounced my cholesterol too high.
It was only then that I started to understand how tightly I had been holding myself; how I had been using guilt and shame as sources of motivation. I was physically and mentally shattered.
I began thinking about what I really found meaningful. I had started writing fiction in early 2014, but my exercise routine had taken over. Once it was laid to rest, I had the time to take it up again.
In 2015, I started writing a dystopian novel where life expectancies were 300 years, and wellness had become a competitive sport. Two years later, I sold the book, left my job, and started a master’s programme in creative writing. That novel, Suicide Club is published today.
My inflamed Achilles tendon healed some time ago. I still exercise but I try to do so mindfully, without the self-flagellation and competitiveness of the past. I take pleasure in yoga, I run at a leisurely pace. I have grown to enjoy Brussels sprouts, albeit of the crispy, flashfried variety. My cholesterol is doing OK and, finally, so am I.
Our predecessors had escaped into drugs; we wanted a dopamine hit