Trudy Tyler and the three camps of lockdown exercise

It seems to me that in lockdown people have fallen into three fitness tribes. There are those who have gone mad for it, fitting up the spare room as a home gym and spending the money they would have spent on going out on a Peloton. There are those who have given up altogether, succumbing absolutely to the siren call of the sofa. And there are those, like me, who have addressed the issue of exercise somewhat sporadically, embarking on a number of new regimes with great enthusiasm, only to end up having to retreat back to the sofa with ice packs and painkillers two days into each new fitness craze.

In the olden days I dragged myself to pilates once a week, so during the first lockdown I tried to keep that up – following workout videos on line. That went horribly wrong when I followed an NHS pilates video for back pain that left me with a slipped disc. In November’s brief lockdown, I didn’t bother, reasoning it was only three weeks and it wasn’t worth doing myself an injury. At the start of this lockdown, I vowed to walk 15,000 steps a day and do at least twenty minutes of yoga. I signed up to Yoga With Adriene and started receiving her daily inspirational emails. A few weeks later, I unsubscribed. Which left the walking. Eight thousand steps on a good day. A very good day.

So when my neighbour Brenda suggested that I join her for a run, what I should have said was “No, thanks”. What I accidentally said was, “Er, sure, why not?” Brenda was in her seventies. How painful could it be?

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At the appointed time on Friday morning, Brenda and I met on the pavement outside my house. She was resplendent in an emerald ensemble the Green Goddess would have been proud of. I was wearing the jogging bottoms I bought in lockdown one. They’re by Hush, the brand beloved of yummy mummies. It took two months of dogged persistence to get hold of a pair. Every morning, after checking my in-box for client disasters, I would log on to Hush.com to see whether they had restocked my target navy joggers in my size. I set up an email alert for the same pair at JohnLewis.com but within minutes of any alert coming through, they would have sold out again. Getting those trackie bottoms became a retail mission on a par with getting hold of a Birkin.

When they finally arrived they were slightly too small but I decided to slim into them (fat chance). Returning them seemed impossible. At that point in lockdown one, going to the post office involved being prepared to camp out for three days, like people used to do outside the Harrods sale. Except that the post office queue was not a place of camaraderie. It was a socially distanced shuffle of people who threatened to tear limb from limb anyone unfortunate enough to sneeze.

Anyway, the Hush trackies were about to get their first sports-related outing.

“They look warm,” said Brenda.

That was fine by me. I had no intention of running fast enough to get hot.

I followed Brenda’s warm-up routine until the point where she lifted her foot onto my fence with balletic grace. Fortunately, Glenn the postman appeared and interrupted us before I did myself another injury. With luck, Brenda wouldn’t notice that I hadn’t quite finished all the exercises.

“You’re going running together? That’s fantastic. Got to keep your cardio up,” Glenn said.

Brenda agreed. “We won’t be slacking.”

That sounded bad. Was this the moment to tell her I hadn’t run on purpose since 1990, during my last ever school cross-country? I’d only run then because the PE teacher had found my “sit down and have a smoke” spot.

“Since you haven’t run for a while, we’ll do a three, two, one formation,” Brenda told me. “Walk three, jog two, run one.”

The walk three was a doddle. We had time to talk about Brenda’s recent brush with an internet scammer who targeted lonely hearts using photos lifted from a Danish dentist’s website. “Will you email the dentist?” she said. “I don’t think I can stand the embarrassment.”

I promised I would.

Then we jogged for two. Well, one and a half. I pretended my shoe lace had come undone.

“Now full pelt for one,” Brenda announced.

Who would have thought that running for a minute could be so bloody painful? Fifty seconds in, I pretended an urgent message had come through on my Apple watch. I don’t even have an Apple watch.

“I used to be a PE teacher,” said Brenda, as we walk-jogged/limped back to our street. “I am so glad that scammer prompted me to get back into it. There’s nothing like a runner’s high.”

Runner’s high? I didn’t get one. It was like the one and only time I tried smoking weed. I didn’t get high then either. I just needed to lie down.

That is exactly what I did when Brenda and I parted. I made it as far as my kitchen and lay down on the floor. My chest was still heaving. I had no idea I was so very unfit. Could I fix it? It felt like I would die trying. I rolled onto my front and lay my cheek against the cool tiles. I had to pull myself together in time to join the office Zoom call at ten.

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As I struggled to get back up, I heard a scuffle of tiny feet. I turned my head, expecting to see Minky. But no. As they came into focus, I realised that the little black eyes regarding me from beneath the fridge were smaller and closer together and on either side of a much more pointed nose.

This was no hamster. It was a mouse.

I sat up suddenly then, cracking my head on the edge of my kitchen table. My heart was pounding faster than it had on my terrible run. It was just one mouse, I told myself. Just one mouse.

Oh, the myth of the single mouse. Everyone knows that no mouse lives alone. And where was Minky? Had she gone over to the dark side?