How I learned to love exercise

Exercise is one of the most misunderstood activities of the 21st century, isn’t it?

It gets all tied up with confusing and complicated messages about body shape, athletic ability and winning things. All this is very off-putting and it’s no wonder hordes of us feel like we’re simply not exercise people. I actually got on with sport in school, but it was easy to abandon it afterwards – crushed as I became by the myopic trinity of negative body image, performance anxiety and perfectionism.

For decades, I wore my non-athleticism with pride, defensively standing on the metaphorical sidelines smoking my Silk Cut Purples (the Marlboro Lights of the nineties) as if declaring, “I don’t need to compete with anyone. I’m not even trying here, so don’t feel sorry for me.”

But six years ago I had a thought… Why did I feel that exercise was a club for which I was not eligible? I mean, isn’t everyone – no matter what age, shape, mindset or situation – qualified to exercise? I’m pretty sure there isn’t a mythical set of rules governing who is allowed to start exercising and when.

And slowly it dawned on me that I didn’t need to join a club or have goals or commit to a plan or have a certain body or overpriced specific things on that body to do it. And slowly the death grip of crippling self-consciousness that I had around exercise began to loosen. So now I turn up. I turn up in my togs. I turn up on the mat. I turn up on the tennis court, on the hiking trail, and even in a kayak.

I know: no one is more surprised than me. After many decades of occupying the same space, like polite-but-distant flatmates, I ask things of my body now and it responds, to my amazement and delight. It’s a conversation we’ve never had before.

Friends of mine who have been watching me embrace my midlife adventures often tell me they don’t know where to begin when it comes to getting fit because they’re not “sporty”. But I’m not sporty at all – I’m the most basic sea dipper (I can’t dive, I only do the breaststroke, and I never put my face in the water), I won’t jog or run voluntarily, I can’t do a simple back bend in yoga or attempt a headstand (too stiff, too frightened), I’m paralysingly uncoordinated (I mean genuinely at risk) on a reformer Pilates machine, and I still don’t know what it really is to “engage my core”. But it doesn’t stop me having a go, because exercise has improved my life immeasurably since I started doing it regularly. For people with overactive, anxious minds (my people), I can’t think of anything better to do. Partly because when you’re a beginner and trying to navigate your kayak out of the brambles at the side of the lake, there’s no room in your head for a single thought beyond how incredibly hard it is. And partly because it is a primal feeling – the thwack of the ball on your racquet as it hits the sweet spot in the middle and flies into a perfect arc, high over the net, with a force you didn’t know you possessed, grazing the line and winning the point. And maybe it’s just a desire to stretch or sweat; to feel blood rush through your body or cold air brush your cheek.

I’m cultivating a lifelong relationship with movement, and I’m so much better mentally as well as physically for it. Sport really is for anyone. You don’t have to be the best, you just have to relish the way it makes you feel more alive, because that’s what it will do, even if you just jog to the end of the road holding a cup of tea and listening to My Therapist Ghosted Me on your phone. Trust me.

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This article originally appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of IMAGE Magazine.