Health, Fitness and Well-being

Story · all 20 words

The Physiotherapist Who Told Me Off

I started running at thirty-eight for the least romantic reason available: I got out of breath carrying a chest of drawers up one flight of stairs, and my brother-in-law, who is nine years older, did not.

The first three weeks were humiliating in the way everybody warns you about and nobody believes until it happens. I could manage about four minutes. My stamina was so poor that I invented reasons to stop – a shoelace, a phone call, a genuinely fascinating cat.

Then it got better, and that was the problem.

By February my fitness had improved enough that I could run for half an hour, and I decided, on no evidence whatsoever, that the correct response was to run every single day. I did not warm up, because warming up was for people with more time. I ran in shoes I had bought in 2016.

In March I began to feel permanently run down. Not ill – I did not come down with anything, I had no symptom you could put a name to. Just grey. I was exhausted by Thursday every week and I put it down to work.

Then I twisted my ankle on a kerb in the rain, and that was that.

It is remarkably easy to sprain an ankle when your legs are too tired to correct a small mistake. That is not bad luck; that is what tiredness is for. The injury itself was minor. What it cost me was eleven weeks.

I went to my GP, who was kind and busy and gave me the sentence I did not want, which was that there is no treatment for this beyond rest. No prescription. A painkiller if I needed one, ice, and time.

Six weeks later, still limping, I paid for a physiotherapist, and she was the one who actually told me off.

She asked how many rest days I had taken between January and March. I said I did not really believe in rest days. She put her pen down, which is never a good sign, and explained that I had not been training – I had been slowly damaging myself and calling it discipline. Rest, she said, is not the gap between the training. Rest is when the training works.

I had been treating my body like something to defeat rather than something to look after.

The recovery plan was embarrassingly gentle. Three runs a week, never on consecutive days. Ten minutes of proper warming up, which I had considered optional and is not. Swimming on Wednesdays, which I hated for a month and now prefer. And she made me cut out the thing I was most attached to, which was checking the pace on my watch, because I could not run slowly while I could see a number.

It took nearly three months to recover properly and I was furious about all of it.

What I did not expect was how much of the grey lifted once the running became sane. A great deal of what I had assumed was stress from work was simply not sleeping enough and running on empty legs. I go for a check-up now, once a year, which I never used to do.

I am slower than I was in that reckless February. I can also still walk, which the February version of me was quietly working towards being unable to do. If well-being means anything useful, I think it means that: not the best week you can produce, but the ninth week in a row you can repeat. I keep fit now. I no longer try to win anything.