Perhaps my new-found interest is the result of decades of conditioning by the media
When I was a schoolboy, you’d have been unlikely to find the words ‘sporting prowess’ and ‘Philip Womack’ uttered in the same breath. Bar a brief moment aged 13, when, being lankier than my peers, I could win sprints without too much effort, I was always much happier loafing about with my copy of J.K. Huysman’s decadent novel, A Rebours, than I was getting stuck into scrums on the freezing rugby pitches. Always picked last, I would hover by the lines, oblivious to the cries of ‘Catch!’ or whatever else came hurling my way.
My lack of interest in games was certainly not hereditary. I spring from a long line of sporting forebears, with accomplished cricketing ancestors going back four generations. One Victorian ancestress was the All England Women’s Croquet Champion. Yet somehow, the sporting gene seemed to have skipped me. Whilst I’ve always undergone some kind of weekly exercise unwillingly (and often hungover), this was mostly in order to stave off the portly, gout-ridden 18th-century vicar that I am destined to become, rather than for any love of physical fitness.
I usually view the gym with creeping horror, a chore to be endured as I, pasty-faced and oddly-shaped, tiptoe gingerly amongst the Adonises and Amazons who sweat and grunt with such confidence. This year, however, something has shifted. Last week, as I was groaning under a mildly heavy weight, I found myself experiencing something I’d normally feel when reading Homer or George Eliot: pleasure. I had to check myself. Was I becoming a jock? Was it, like athlete’s foot, catching?
Perhaps my new-found interest is the result of decades of conditioning by the media. Recently, I spotted one of my ex-pupils posing on the cover of Men’s Health, like some ancient Spartan. It’s enough to make any chap feel inadequate. There is also the invasive power of Instagram. Every September (and January) my feed – usually a sedate parade of churches, books and horses – begins to fill up with pictures of sad, pot-bellied, middle-aged men. These are spliced next to later versions of themselves, in which they are muscled and beaming. The images are captioned with things like ‘We are looking 4 MEN aged 40-45 to TRANSFORM. Sign up here for 10 sessions.’ If you betray mild interest in one, soon you will be drowning in adverts, and impossibly muscled 20-year-olds called Josh and Jack will be shouting at you. ‘Get a six pack without giving up drink!’ they cry. Well, if that’s true, where do I sign, Josh?
Perhaps, too, it’s the fact that exercising engenders a sense of achievement. Writing, by contrast, tends not to. You never get praise, or much of a sense of career progression. But if I’ve lifted a heavier weight, or run marginally faster, my personal trainer (when I can afford one) is delighted. One day, I am going to start talking about Personal Bests. (If I do that, please shoot me). Vanity lurks in the mix too: I take pleasure in being able to sport the dinner jacket I wore as an 18-year-old. There’s also a sense that, as I approach my late forties, and the years blur past with increasing velocity, this is the last throw of the dice. I’m hardly likely to take up kick boxing in my fifties.
And so, I now find myself anticipating my visits to the gym, despite its foetid atmosphere, with some eagerness. Though I am usually the sole floppy-haired, spindly aesthete in the room, the others aren’t simply muscles and lycraed thighs. There is the chap who reads his London Review of Books on the treadmill. There are the old ladies cycling gently before lunch; a couple of buffers chatting about their French villas. There’s a wide social mix, too, from tattooed cockney to Panama hat-wearing toff. My gym attracts the odd A-list actor, and even – or so I’ve been told – a certain ex-Prime Minister. Old and young mix freely, navigating the machines with almost courtly politesse. ‘Oh no, after you,’ says the hulk who could snap you in two. ‘I do insist – I only have one set left,’ replies the plump matriarch.
The one thing that’s missing is connection: everyone wears earbuds, and glares at their exercise plans on their phones. Fair enough: nobody wants to strike up a conversation when you’re red in the face and pungent, though a smile would be nice. Even better, I have, at last, found a use for my iPhone which doesn’t drive me insane. When I’m on the bike, the cross trainer or (my favourite!) the step machine, I solve a Wordle as quickly as I can, then pull up a Shakespeare play (I’ve been re-reading them in alphabetical order).
There are downsides, sure. I have been introduced to something literally uncomfortable, called chafing. And my hands – which have been consistently described as ‘maidenly’ – must contend with blisters. Still, I console myself with the fact that, in using the gymnasium as a space for exercise, both physical and mental, that I’m fully in the spirit of the Ancient Greeks. Except, of course, that I don’t do squats in the nude. That might be taking it too far.
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