Related read: The most important thing your kids can learn from the Olympics Now, they’re scheduled to take place July 23 to Aug. ![]() Sadly, they had to be postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 9, 2020 (and the Paralympic Games from Aug. Last summer’s Olympic Games, the XXXII Olympiad, were supposed to take place in Tokyo, Japan, from July 24 to Aug. That and the smugness, obviously.The Olympic Games bring the world together every two years to celebrate athletic excellence and fair play. Adults and kids alike love the pageantry of the torch relay and closing ceremonies, the fun mascots and overall excitement, as well as the chance to watch top-level athletes compete in a variety of sports. Learning I can do something I hate three times a week has been the real boon. I think often of a phrase used by the author Tegan Bennett Daylight – the difficulty is the point. That magic “coming to love exercise” has never arrived but I’ve come to realise what counts is I do it anyway. Really, it isn’t the thing itself that matters but the awfulness of the thing. Most of my thinking is “oh God, this is awful” or little ear worm snippets of half-remembered songs. ![]() But I don’t think the main benefits of running – mental or otherwise – really have anything to do with running itself. During a particularly stressful week, I found myself squeezing in an extra run, without really knowing why. ![]() Yes, it’s been good for my mental health. Yes, it feels good to be fit and to be able to trust your body. I also want them to learn that you don’t have to like exercise to keep doing it. I take the kids with me on Sundays because I want them to learn that sooner than I did – and to learn that exercise doesn’t have to mean winners or losers but can bring a kind of freedom. In an age of digital detachment, where our avatars – and our identities – often feel more real than our physical selves, there is a liberation to actually being in your body. I’ve learned to work with my body instead of against it, to listen to my breath and know whether to push myself or ease off. I no longer want to be distracted from how awful running is. Over time I’ve even stopped listening to music and leave my phone at home. All you need is half an hour and a pair of reasonable shoes. You don’t need to recruit a team or be anywhere at the same time every week. If there’s something I like about running – it’s a short list – it’s that it requires no technology or specialised equipment. I would rather die than set foot in a gym or recruit a personal trainer, yet here I was using an app that was trying to make a solo pursuit into something competitive or performative. Strava was useful when I started, helping ensure I was running far and fast enough but I realised its relentless comparisons were taking away what little fun there was. That sourdough ballast came away with surprising ease, partly because running was so dreadful that I started looking at heavy food and couldn’t bear the thought of carrying it around the track.Īs the novelty of running wore off, I learned to jettison the apps – those tools that strive to gamify exercise. My body soon went from a heavy thing I dragged around Albert Park Lake to something that bounced along on its own (even if it still made a worrying wheezing noise). To transform your body from obstacle to enabler. What I’ve realised since is that the gift of fitness isn’t to make exercise pleasurable but to make impossible things achievable. It’s not a love of running that has kept me going but the visceral memory of exactly how painful those early mornings were. The idea of running for 30 minutes felt like climbing to the moon – complete with total lack of oxygen. ![]() Running for 90 seconds felt like climbing Everest. The app allowed me to listen to my own music (a playlist of film scores I dubbed “You’re a big man, but you’re out of shape”) while the BBC DJ Jo Whiley popped up every now and then to tell me to start or stop or to promise me that, one day, I too would love running. If there’s something I like about running – it’s a short list – it’s that it requires no technology or specialised equipment Also, I was aware that the heavy sourdough habit I’d picked up during the first lockdown was leading me towards an urgent wardrobe upheaval. We were only allowed out of the house for an hour a day. I started running during the great second Melbourne lockdown, after my wife discovered the NHS’s Couch to 5K app. You may ask yourself: how did I get here? And yet, this Sunday morning, like almost every Sunday morning for the past two and a half years, I voluntarily ran a brisk 5km around my neighbourhood, while the kids cycled behind, grumbling about the hills.
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