The joy of the London Marathon serves as an inspiring reminder that the only right way to exercise is to be determined enough to do so, writes Kat Brown.
Overcoming school PE trauma
As thousands of Britons check their trainers ready for today’s London Marathon, for those of us watching, it is like an annual exhale that dispels bad memories of school PE lessons.
This week, new research from Age UK found that, years later, more than four million Brits aged between 50 and 65 still feel negatively affected by their experience of school sport, while more than a quarter of respondents said it had put them off exercise “for life”. This, mercifully, seems to have changed for the new generation. Last month, I visited Dorset House School in West Sussex, where the attitude to sport and movement more generally was so delightfully encouraging that, in the absence of a child to send there, I almost asked if I could send my dog instead. Or me.
For many of us, the shadow of the enforced school PE lesson looms large. It has become a rite of passage for 20-somethings to rediscover their relationship with exercise, whether through a new hobby or finding a regimen that they actually enjoy.
Changing attitudes towards fitness
Crucially, the all-or-nothing wellness mentality that once dominated social media has also had its day. “People started realising [much of it is] a marketing ploy,” the cultural researcher and marketing strategist Viktoriia Vasileva told Dazed. “Now, it is [just] swagless nerds who count their macros and West Village girls who make pilates and matcha their whole personality.”
The Health at Every Size and This Girl Can campaigns have brought exercise to people who felt shamed for not looking like the media had told them fit people “should”, while the author and campaigner Bryony Gordon’s multiple marathons in her underwear have done much to cheerfully smash stigma around exercising to look a certain way, rather than to feel better.
Put simply, sport is for everyone. The lopers, the loafers, the ungainly, those without the right trainers. Two of my favourite recent books, Marion Deuchars’ Yoga For Stiff Birds, and Alison Bechdel’s The Secret of Superhuman Strength, use illustrations to bring exercise to life, but it was Alexandra Heminsley’s revolutionary memoir Running Like a Girl which completely changed how I felt about it. I started doing parkrun. I would casually knock off a 10k with friends before brunch! So carried away was I that I ended up both as a literal poster girl for the charity Mind and running the London Marathon in 2014. Not bad for someone still haunted by memories of the beep test and cold, cold hockey fields.
The inspiring diversity of the marathon
Watching the London Marathon is the most inspiring day in the capital. Thousands upon thousands of people, each putting one foot in front of the other for charities, many of whom have never run long distances before they signed up to do this. My friend, the If Not For You author Georgina Lucas, is running for Tommy’s, the charity that helped her and her husband after the premature birth of their late son, Grey. Another friend has raised over £5,000 for the Suicide Network in memory of her late brother. Watching them somehow fit in their lengthy training has been truly incredible; arguably more so than those for whom exercise forms part of their career, although those achievements are impressive.
And watching it, you are reminded that there is no one type of runner: blind, in a wheelchair, amputee, thin, fat, tall, small, black, white or brown. Anyone and everyone straps on their trainers, at every age, too. Last year, 3,818 runners were aged over 60. Forty were over 80! However much brands and adverts seek to sell exercise as something expensive and aspirational, there are plenty of people quietly doing it their way. Just look at the uproar that greeted Nike’s rather tone-deaf billboards in London parkrun locations, declaiming “You didn’t come all this way for a walk in the park.” It is none of your business who is walking, thank you very much!
As a new intake of Marathon runners prepares to do something extraordinary, my heartiest congratulations go to every one of them. Walk, jog, run or roll: the only “type” of runner is the one who has got the determination to do it.
