Be not idle…

You can run from some problems

To say I wasn’t very sporty at school would be an understatement. My main memories of PE are a mix of dread and hopelessness, coming last in sprints, getting bowled out for nothing in cricket and failing even to make the F team in football. Ours wasn’t a very big school, so this actually required quite remarkable levels of unskillfulness on my part. The funny thing is that I thought I was pretty good at football, but that may just be part of the delusion that male brains are installed with to protect them from reality.

Then there was our school’s single, farcical attempt to introduce the boys to rugby, which I think was part of a wider aspiration to regain its past nobility as a grammar. The school was a grant-maintained comprehensive, but the teachers wore gowns and the top set learned Latin, yet the ethos of rugby didn’t quite suit the school make-up and I recall it basically just turning into organised fighting (perhaps that’s just what rugby is)

The only game I was really any good at was badminton, the weakest and most effeminate of all the racket sports. I especially hated running, but then I was quite fat until around the age of 14 when I discovered a fool-proof way of losing weight – this one weird diet trick called ‘smoking’. When we were allowed to drop PE in the fifth year it came as a huge relief, and I felt my life had immeasurably improved. 

I’d have been surprised to see myself, 25 years later, actively paying money to do the thing I most hated at school (by now I was also doing the same with French, my second least favourite). The idea of voluntarily having soldiers order me about would have seemed positively masochistic. 

Our school didn’t have any military tradition, and being from a long line of soft-handed bourgeois wordcels I was both too posh and too common to ever consider it. Like many people my age, my idea of ‘military training’ came from watching Full Metal Jacket, which I remember as a teenager leaving me with the distinct impression that I definitely wouldn’t make it in the Armed Forces, if I ever had that illusion. I would probably have ended up crying in my pants while eating a doughnut as the rest of the unit did punishment PT.

But there you go. Things are different when you enter your 30s. 

I had vaguely heard about people who used to run around in Hyde Park with some instructors dressed in army uniform; it was called British Military Fitness, or BMF, and a colleague on a newspaper I briefly worked at had written an article about joining it – but it wasn’t something that ever really crossed my mind. 

Apparently, this craze for military training had been started by former servicemen on the set of Saving Private Ryan. They had been brought in to work with the actors and get them fit, and realised there might be a wider market for people to train with the help of soldiers. 

I had reached my late 20s in a generally terrible state, a smoker and binge drinker, overweight and easily out of breath after the merest exertion. I was a frequent gym joiner but would always grow bored and demotivated after a few weeks. There was something about sitting in a crowded room watching MTV pumping out a constant dirge that filled me with overwhelming feelings of defeat. In the end my gym sessions must have worked out at £30 a visit, so rarely did I actually use the thing. The only exercise I regularly did and enjoyed was cycling.

I had vaguely pledged to give up smoking when I hit 30 or became a father, and then they happened to coincide – so I did. My weight started to go up, while one of the many things I didn’t appreciate about having a baby is that it’s quite physically exhausting. 

Baby number two followed soon, and one day I went along with my wife to our local park as she did one of those exercise sessions for new mums, which mainly involved pushing around prams. I was by this stage grotesquely out of shape – sweating when I eat sort of thing – and reaching that stage in life when many men basically give up.

The session was fun enough; but in the distance I saw a bunch of people in variously coloured jerseys running around. It was those Army guys again. I must have been vaguely aware they used the park although I don’t remember it, because it never would have occurred to me to join. I just assumed that anything like that would end up with my total humiliation before committing a murder-suicide on the instructor. 

I started at the class closest to my work, in the military barracks incongruously hidden away in Old Street – although they don’t do BMF there anymore – and, if I’m honest, I didn’t really enjoy the first few sessions. In fact I was pretty convinced I was going to die, and that’s never fun. I’d feel a huge sense of dread and anxiety beforehand.

But the instructors were kind - the total opposite of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman - and no one laughed at you if you struggled. After all, many people were in the same boat. There were a few very incredibly fit people but there were always many others starting off, too; after a while you spot newbies who have come along, quite seriously overweight, and then you notice them a couple of months later and they’ve shed three stone and are zooming past you.

Even a few sessions makes a big difference and I remember, in the third or fourth week, feeling far lighter and quicker. Neither did I feel dread anymore and, besides which, once the endorphins start kicking in after 15 minutes the sessions always got easier, but getting to that stage was often hard.

But that’s the whole point; it is hard, and nothing that’s easy is really rewarding. Something I didn’t always appreciate in my extended adolescence was that you should do things that make you feel dread and anxiety, because life is all contrast: light and shade, pain and pleasure.

In retrospect I think that through these exercise classes I learned some of the things that now seem obvious but that the teenage me just couldn’t grasp; having that sense of accomplishment is really important psychologically. There are bad days, and as you enter middle age they become more frequent, but with these exercise classes you have at least accomplished one definitive positive that day. 

And during bad times exercise classes have been a lifesaver. A few years back there was a rough patch after my dad died (as is common after losing a parent). There followed all the typical symptoms – a loss of interest or enjoyment in anything, long sleeps, constant anxiety, the feeling that it wouldn’t end. I really didn’t want to get up at any time, let alone work out, but I knew that the mind needed endorphins to avoid sinking even further and the body could lend a hand. It really helped a lot.

Then came lockdown, which for many people brought crushing anxiety, loneliness and despair at the future. I often woke up with that sense of uhtceare, the Old English word for early morning dread. The classes could only go ahead on Zoom - but they were the highlight of the (not very exciting) week.

Rather unsurprisingly, it turned out that regular exercise was the most beneficial thing for mental health during lockdown (just as unsurprisingly, reading about Covid was the worst).

‘Mental health’, a phrase we now use to describe what might have once been termed ‘wellbeing’, became far more of a topic that awful year. Since then, it has been a constant subject of the discourse, to such an extent that it may even be having a bad effect on our mental health. The phrase has gone through something of an expansion in definition; whereas it used to refer mostly to very serious conditions like schizophrenia or psychosis, it has now come to apply more to severe stress, anxiety, sadness or just low mood. 

I don’t especially have any knowledge of the subject or the ‘mental health crisis’, but I’m always surprised how little exercise is ever mentioned. I’ve noticed, talking to friends suffering from repeated low mood, how often they never consider physical activity a potential remedy. 

Yet exercise is obviously vital to mental health, one of those things which is both glaringly obvious and backed up by a vast amount of evidence from modern scientific studies. There are huge benefits associated with exercise, and being physically active halves the risk of anxiety over time. 

For serious mental illness, exercise perhaps doesn’t make much difference, but it does have a big impact on depression. and for mild forms of depression and anxiety is shown to be effective. The BMJ states that exercise improves symptoms of depression. with 43% fewer bad days recorded.

Being sedentary is also linked to adolescent anxiety while ‘higher cardiorespiratory fitness is associated with lower depressive symptoms in adults.’ The effects can be very long terms, so that one study found ‘an increase in high school sports participation rates for girls leads to sizeable improvements in mental health by ages 35–45.’ There is evidence that three hours a week of exercise makes a big difference, while experiments involving people with depression show that exercise often lessens the length or severity of their bouts. It also helps with drug addiction.

All forms of exercise can help. Martial arts improves the wellbeing of teenagers, while skateboarding in middle age is very good for you, even if I couldn’t bring myself to inflict that on my children. But perhaps the best activity for mental health is team sports. This really struck me while watching White Lotus, where the rich but miserable teenage boy stuck on holiday with his family looking at internet porn only finds meaning and happiness when he joins in with some local lads rowing; with that he gains a sense of accomplishment, fraternity and lactic acid, three things essential to our wellbeing. Or as Robert Burton put it, ‘be not solitary, be not idle.’