4: Running Out of Necessity

I had an hour and a half free between PT sessions yesterday afternoon so thought I’d go for a run. I don’t like running with keys in my pocket because the noise bothers me, so I took the latch key off and put it in my shorts pocket and left the house. I closed the door and thought I should just double-check that I had the right key, since I’d recently got some new keys for the hall that looked quite similar. Of course, I’d taken the wrong one.

We had given a spare key to a neighbour but he’d lost it. I tried calling a friend who has one but they didn’t pick up. My only option was to run and get a key from Leila, who was on the other side of Bristol, in Hotwells, with her dad. I had to run because I had a PT session in an hour and a half.

So that’s what I did! It was about half an hour there and half an hour back. Perhaps this doesn’t sound like much to a more experienced runner but it’s the most I’ve done since the start of lockdown. I had no pain and kept a pretty consistent pace throughout. I was initially trying to stay in a specific heart rate zone (2) but noticed that my heart rate seemed to just creep up steadily regardless of the pace I was running at, so I just ran a bit faster so that I’d definitely be back in time for work. It wasn’t a big deal.

As I ran I listened to the most recent episode of the Lift the Bar Podcast which had an interview with Chris Burgess, who runs the Curious gym near Bath, all about reopening after the lockdown. I’d spent the morning writing up a summary of the government guidance for the co-op gym so it was an interesting pairing.

Anyway, I was pleased to be able to run that distance without too much drama. I didn’t really have any other option. So often I am agonising over what I’m training for, and it can be a hard question to answer for reasons besides vanity. Modern lifestyles don’t require much strength or fitness, and the amount of formal training required for longevity and quality of life benefits is really pretty minimal. But I still want to train more since I really value the idea that I am capable of, I don’t know, carrying someone out of a burning building or something equally dramatic like that.

Sports science definitions of fitness from most traditions centre around the idea of “performance”. In the case of sportspeople, that performance is quite easy to imagine - a discus thrower trains to throw the discus further - but it’s harder if you’re not an athlete.

For many of us, our “performance” involves sitting still for long periods of time. Of course training can help with that in sort of providing the opposite stimulus for the body and helping us do such jobs without the pain and health consequences that can go along with them, but we can’t train in a way that directly affects the sedentary work itself, really, so definitions of fitness become more complicated.

Today’s run was a rare case of being required to “perform” in a vaguely athletic way, and I was glad of having done the training to enable it.