New Times,
New Thinking.

  1. Culture
  2. Life
23 October 2024

The secret to becoming a runner? The sweet promise of baked goods

My fitness app is helping me set realistic goals, and it’s been transformative.

By Pippa Bailey

I found much to dread each week at school: boredom (geography), serious bodily harm (woodwork), the very real possibility that I was, in fact, quite thick (maths). But nothing conjured that oppressive, pit-of-your-stomach sensation quite like PE. I couldn’t catch a ball, or hit a ball, or do anything with a ball except flail in its general direction. Nor could I do much more in gymnastics – too aware of all the unique and incredibly painful ways my body could break – than fling myself at the side of the vault we were supposed to clear.

And I certainly could not run. This fact was made agonisingly clear each September, when we were put through the torture of “fitness trials”: the bleep test and 1,500 metres. I found the insistence that we repeat-failers were still made to complete them baffling: did they really think we teenage girls had done anything since the previous year to improve our fitness? Au contraire, we had been fuelling so-called sleepovers with Red Bull and Nutella. “Never mind,” my tutor once told me. “You’re just not a very physical person,” as though I was but a floating bundle of thoughts. This was enforced, in the most well-meaning of ways, by my family: my younger brother was the sporty one, I was the academic one, and that was fine. You couldn’t be good at everything.

When I discovered weightlifting in my mid twenties, this narrative had to be revised. I wasn’t coordinated, fast, or flexible, but I was strong. Short, sharp bursts of grit and intense mind-body connection I could do. But endurance? Aerobic fitness? Not my thing. I had tried Couch to 5K several times and always failed around the run-for-20-minutes-without-stopping mark, never making it past the I’m-bored-this-hurts phase.

Well, the narrative must be revised once more, for I have become that most tiresome of things: a runner. I have been running several times a week for six months now, and am in possession of the holy trinity of Things That Maketh a Runner: a Garmin watch, a Salomon vest, and a healthy bagel-and-jam habit (the first two, I feel the need to point out lest you consider me an imprudent spender, were second-hand bargains). Oh, and I can now run 10km without stopping. And I enjoy it.

I owe this remarkable about-turn to an app called Runna (I am not, I should clarify, sponsored by them, though I would gladly be), which has provided me with a training plan that, through a combination of speed and endurance work, built up to my first 5k, then my first 10k. Next up: half marathon. I do not have to believe that I can do it; if Runna says I can, then I can. It costs £16 a month, which is affordable for me, and should be free of charge on the NHS for everyone for whom it is not.

Select and enter your email address Your weekly guide to the best writing on ideas, politics, books and culture every Saturday. The best way to sign up for The Saturday Read is via saturdayread.substack.com The New Statesman's quick and essential guide to the news and politics of the day. The best way to sign up for Morning Call is via morningcall.substack.com
Visit our privacy Policy for more information about our services, how Progressive Media Investments may use, process and share your personal data, including information on your rights in respect of your personal data and how you can unsubscribe from future marketing communications.
THANK YOU

The other key to this transformation is what I am calling the run-reward ratio: I find running a loop, beginning and ending at home, more mentally testing than running to a destination. More often than not, that destination involves food. Last weekend, I completed the final few kilometres of my Runna-prescribed long run in near lockstep with a man who, it turned out, was also heading to the bakery I’d set my sights on. It would have been a perfect meet-cute, had I been single.

This summer my stepmother renamed the family WhatsApp group I had created for updates on my father’s treatment for leukaemia to the less gloom-laden “Bailey banter”. Too soon, it turned out. Two weeks later, he was back in hospital; the cancer had returned. I resolved I would not write about it until there was an outcome, one way or the other. In the following months, I mentally drafted and redrafted the column I would write if he died – it was a morbid sort of coping mechanism, I suppose; a way to organise the fear, to make it digestible, perhaps even meaningful.

That I have devoted only a few short paragraphs to the subject, and that you have not struggled to read them through an unstoppable veil of tears, is something of a spoiler: Dad is once more in remission. “Phew,” he texted, ever a master of understatement. I hope fiercely that I will never have to commit that other column to paper. But rest assured, it would have been beautiful.

[See also: Debunking the fiscal black hole myth]

Content from our partners
Why Rachel Reeves needs to focus on food in schools
No health, no growth
Tackling cancer waiting times

Topics in this article : ,

This article appears in the 23 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The crisis candidate