Paddle up! The sporting fun you can enjoy while social distancing
While many sports are still being shown the red card, Guy Kelly checks out the activities we can do
Now that lockdown is easing, Britain is preparing to get back outdoors, and an unlikely sporting pastime has emerged: paddleboarding, which has so many clamouring to climb aboard that retailers have now run out. Given so many traditional summer sports still contravene social-distancing rules, is it any wonder board sales are 15 times higher than usual?
Summer 2020, it turns out, has some old sporting trends and some new, meaning you can buy even more equipment for hobbies you may not actually enjoy but will at least pass an hour of your life and look impressive on Instagram. Here are five of them.
Paddle and go
Do you remember, four years ago, when Orlando Bloom and his giant, um, oar appeared on the pages of every tabloid in the land after he was caught naked at sea with (the wisely clothed) pop star Katy Perry?
That could soon be you! This year, stand-up paddleboarding – the activity Bloom was undertaking as he ferried Perry around the Caribbean – is turning into the nation’s newest obsession, with demand so high that one company has sold six months’ stock in four weeks.
It involves standing up on a giant board and, that’s right, paddling. There is space enough at the front for a pet, a backpack, or A-list girlfriend, and as you slowly beat down a river or across a bay, it’ll do wonders for your core strength. A warning, though: boards – which are either fibreglass or inflatable
– start at around £200 and finish at more than £1,000.
Floating on water
If you’re keen on water but find the idea of standing on it a bit too messianic, how about sitting down? Just as inflatable paddleboards are becoming all the rage, so are its traditional siblings, kayaks, right, canoes, and even boats.
A boat rental site, Getmyboat, has reported a 250 per cent year-on-year growth, while sales of kayaks and canoes have reportedly gone “through the roof ”, the owner of a hire company in Norfolk said last week.
As with paddleboards, an inflatable version may be the way to go, unless you have an empty garage. A solid, two-person inflatable canoe starts at around £150, isn’t too exhausting to operate, collapses to roughly the size of a tent bag, and inflates (with a pump, don’t worry) to at least 2m in length – ideal for socially distant, floating fun. From there, search online for the UK’S best “paddling trails”.
Scandi style
One session of permitted exercise a day led many of us to go on aimless rambles or go running – sales from Saucony.co.uk, a purveyor of upmarket running shoes, grew by 300 per cent from February to April – but perhaps you’re now keen to keep marching on into the summer. Why not get yourself a pair of anti-shock telescopic Nordic walking poles? These are anything from £10 to £100, will provide you with the balance of mountain goat and glowing Zen of a Scandinavian lifestyle blogger, and are perfect for batting away anybody too close.
Going old-school
Unsurprisingly, two of the first sports to be allowed to commence again in May, fishing and tennis, have leapt in popularity in 2020.
According to John Lewis, tennis ball sales in the last eight weeks are up 263 per cent – which suggests we may be making up for a year without Wimbledon by simply creating our own court dramas.
The same is happening in the angling world, where 21,000 new fishing licences were submitted the day after restrictions were lifted. Even garden sports like table tennis (table sales are up 800 per cent) and croquet (600 per cent) are on the rise. In lockdown, it seems, give us a ball, a bat, and a stately enough pace to schedule some drinks breaks, and we’re happy.
Getting fit with kit
After almost three months indoors, you may now have Stockholm syndrome in which you’ve grown so used to relying on your captor, PE guru Joe Wicks, that you fully intend to stay there. After all, you’ve spent all the money you saved from a spring without pubs on new-fangled kit, and can’t bear to put it away. So double down, because plenty are.
Sales of simple bits of kit like yoga mats are up by more than 270 per cent at John Lewis, but so are electronic products that sound like weapons in straight-to-video science fiction films. Theragun, Slendertone, Tanita scales, anybody?
Respectively, these are a sort of jack hammer that’ll give you “percussive massage”; a belt that promises to help create a six-pack; and a set of scales that won’t just weigh you, they’ll tell you your precise body fat percentage.