Death of an identity

The wicked fairy pointed her gnarly magic wand at me and delivered her curse.  “You will never run again,” she spat, as the hair on the wart on her chin wobbled with the force of her words.  “For all your sins, your slovenly ways… Your punishment is that you will never run again!”

Well… that’s not exactly how it went down.  In actual fact the wicked fairy was a condescending orthopaedic surgeon, who looked at me down his haughty nose as he made his pronouncement.  

“I don’t know what part of stupid you don’t understand, Mrs. Jacobs, but,” he paused as though it pained him to share his expertise with someone who was so clearly beneath his intellectual consideration (despite the fact that said imbecile had just shelled out 250 euros for said words of wisdom), “for people with a bad back it is stupid to run.”

And that was that.  When I retold the story to colleagues, friends and family, they were all some version of shocked.  How patronising of him.  How rude of him.  Who did he think he was, speaking to you like that?  

But I actually wasn’t too upset.  “Well, at least he was straight and to the point.  There’s no way I can misunderstand him,” I’d say, shrugging.  “And that was that.  I never ran again.”

I was heartbroken - I’d loved running.  That’s what I said to myself first.  

But then I shrugged again.  Who was I kidding?  I’d hated running.  The sweating.  The feeling that my lungs were going to violently burst out of my chest.  My feet grew heavy and my sight grew dim. I had to stop… oh no, wait, that was a rip off of The Eagles, “Hotel California”.  But my feet were heavy - slapping against the concrete.  My face was beetroot - I was never one of those pretty runners, who glistened with sweat.  Nope, my t-shirt was stuck to me, big sweaty armpits visible to a blind man at the other end of the road, and rivulets running down my red face.  Yes, I’d hated running.

But I had loved the feeling that came after running.  I’d loved the endorphins.  I’d loved how smug I felt when I burst through the front door.  And I’d loved telling people, “oh yes, I’m just back from a run,” or “I was up at 6am this morning, just squeezing in my morning run before work.”  I sounded like a super-bitch - on top of her game, pounding the streets, and then making it back home to get kids out of bed and dash into work.  What a powerhouse!

So when my haughty consultant delivered his pronouncement, the real, honest me celebrated internally - yes, fist pump - but the egotistical, shallow me floundered.  I’d need something to keep me fit, keep burning the calories so that I could sneak in the furtive Mars Bars and Hunky Dory crisps.  Walking was the obvious choice, but it wouldn’t burn calories in the same way unless I was going to do that crazy power-walk dance, like the women that we always ridiculed powering past us like steam engines, their arms jerking up and down like pistons, their chest forward and asses out.  No way was I going to look like that.  And anyway, telling someone that I was “just back from my walk” sounded like I’d parked my cane by the front door, next to my zimmer-frame that I hoped to grow into some day.

I could try the exercise bike, I told myself.  I’d bought one back in the 2000s and had used it for exactly two weeks.  And then I’d rolled it back into the corner, and neatly hung all my freshly ironed shirts on it.  I was sure I could find some wardrobe space for the shirts, dust down the bike and hop on to ride it to God knows where.  At least now there were podcasts and audiobooks and TikTok to entertain me, not like back in the 2000s, where I had tried to read books on the bike.  But the huffing and puffing and swaying from side to side did not lend itself to following the words on a page.  Podcasts however - that was a different story.  I could totally manage those.  Maybe I’d even catch up on all the recorded work meetings that I’d missed - townhalls and inspirational talks.  Super-bitch reins again!

So the shirts were banished to the wardrobe (truth be told, they probably didn’t feel it as banishment but probably rejoiced at being reunited with all their sister shirts).  The bike was rolled out of the corner and dusted off.  My husband even dripped a few drops of oil into the inner workings of the machine so that it would ‘hum like a baby’.  His words, not mine.  I would never have described the sounds of an exercise bike as humming like a baby (and anyway who thinks that babies hum?  Just goes to show how often my husband was around when the kids were babies.)  When I hopped up on that exercise bike the whirring and grinding started and the harder I pedalled the louder it got.  I popped on my headphones, and turned up my podcast - surely Jason, Will and Sean would drown it out with their ‘Smartless’ humour.  Yep, the sounds faded to background noise as the podcast streamed into my ears.  This was it.  I’d found my substitute.  Yep.  This was for me.  I pedalled and pedalled - oxygen streaming in, smugness streaming out.  

Wait, is this only 5 minutes?  Surely not, surely it must be 25.  Maybe the double digits of the display are damaged and it only shows the last digit?  But no, the podcast timer showed that there were another 55 minutes to run. Oh God, when did time slow down so much?  I thought that scientists were adamant that time was time - it was not elastic and all seconds and minutes were equal.  But honestly - did they really mean that 30 minutes of pounding on an exercise bike was the same as 30 minutes of a massage?  Or a facial?  Or a brunch with friends?  Did these scientists ever really conduct any serious experiments to test their hypotheses?  

When I staggered off the bike 30 minutes later, my legs wobbled like jelly.  I looked at the display and saw that I had burned off 210 calories.  Ok, that had to be good.  I whipped out my iPhone and Googled ‘calories in a Mars Bar’. 

225 calories.  

You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me.  

Not even a frigging Mars Bar?  Where is the justice in that?

Safe to say, those shirts were whipped away from the re-acquaintances that they were making in my wardrobe, and hung back on the taunting silver arms of the exercise bike; the bike that was pushed back right into the corner.  

Forget it.  

Forget the bloody consultant.  

Forget my bad back.  

These boots were made for walking - or rather, this woman was made for running!!!