DISCUSSION TOPIC: FIT FOR LIFE?

Two years ago, I couldn’t run a mile. Apart from one 10k I was once conned into doing for charity, I had never run a race in my life. So when my twin sister suggested we ran the London Marathon together in our 40th year, I thought she was completely barking. Why on earth should I, a serial non-runner, even dream of doing anything so daft?

And yet … and yet … somehow the idea stayed and lodged deep within my psyche. I had already decided I wanted to raise money for a wonderful charity I know called Tadworth Court Children’s Trust, which looks after children with very severe needs, and the marathon was an obvious way to do it.

Which is how I found myself two summers ago pounding up and down Epsom Downs after dropping the kids off at school. To my utter amazement, I found that once I had established that I could run a mile (actually not too hard, as it turned out, because I walk a lot and that has kept me fairly fit), it wasn’t too difficult to then push the distances, and before long I found I was regularly running three to four miles. And not only that, I was actually enjoying it.

I’ve written an account of the ups and downs of my marathon training, called Running on Empty: Diary of a Marathon Mum, which I hope will inspire other no hopers like me. Take it from me, if I can run a marathon, anyone can.

While I was writing the book, I started to think about why it was that I was so anti-running before, and I realised that I actually had very negative feelings about sport in general. It wasn’t just that I didn’t regard myself as a runner, I actually felt that I had no right to be there. I felt a fraud throughout most of my training, and still do to an extent. Sure, I’ve run a marathon, but sporty? That’s just not me.

I realized that my feelings had their roots in my experiences of PE at school, which weren’t exactly positive. Our PE teacher tended to favour the sporty kids, and the rest of us could more or less lump it. I was marginally better off then my twin sister, Ginia, in that I could at least play tennis, but the pair of us were pretty much written off as “duffers” which was the appalling phrase she used to refer to us also-rans.

When I think about it, my negative feelings about sport generally went even further back, to my primary school days when Ginia and I found ourselves time after time in the ignominious position of being picked last in the rounders team. We soon learnt that sport wasn’t for us and we had no place there.

I have four children, all girls, and they too are learning that sport isn’t for them. This is mainly because of the disastrous political correctness that has taken hold in schools so the dread word “competition” has come to be seen almost as a dirty word.

Which is why I think it is so important that everyone who is a parent (and women particularly, as generally we still have the greatest daily influence on our offspring) makes it their priority to get their kids out exercising. Sport shouldn’t just be for the sporty, it should be for everyone, however much of duffers we are.

Because, another thing I realised when I was writing my book, was this. Although organized sport in school pretty much passed me by, sport I enjoyed did not. Thanks mainly to my mother who taught me to play tennis (and a very sporty brother who thrashed me at it regularly) made me walk everywhere and packed me off swimming every Saturday, I was pretty active in my teens.

During my early twenties, a couple of sudden bursts of getting overweight were enough to send me haring to aerobics classes, and I kept that up, along with my swimming till the children came along.

Once I started having babies, I lost sight of doing “proper” exercise as I thought for a number of years. But in fact, because I walk everywhere, the years I spent pushing a buggy around weren’t wasted. When I finally made that momentous decision to go for that run, I actually accomplished it with relative ease, as my base levels of fitness were probably better then they’ve been for my entire adult life.

And I want to keep it that way. Which is why I am still running (and hope to enter the marathon again), have got back into tennis, and am swimming and going to the gym as much as possible. My next goal after another marathon is to have a go at the triathlon – I could never have even envisaged that a few years ago.

But it’s not only for myself that I want to get fit, but for my children. I want them to learn from me that sport isn’t something they should be barred from, but something they deserve to have as part of their everyday life. I am delighted that three of the four want to learn tennis – at last I’ll have someone to play with! – they all swim, the one who doesn’t play tennis does gymnastics, and my doing the marathon has awakened an interest in running in all of them. The oldest is about to start a running club, and the next one down has already declared the ambition of running a marathon one day.

Given that London has been granted the 2012 Olympics, it seems to me there is a wonderful opportunity to be grasped here, to offer today’s children a better choice then we had. Sure, we need to train our athletes and get our elite teams together, but sport shouldn’t just be about the best, it should also be about those who try their best and achieve their own personal goals. As a mother, I can make sure my children are fit for life, and I really hope the initiatives will come to support me in that.

Sport isn’t the preserve of the elite, but the right of all of us. And if we are to avoid having a generation of obese and inactive children we have to do something about it today.