What I've learned this week: The Importance Of Keeping Fit...

The Importance Of Keeping Fit! 

As we have all been told, it is important to exercise while on lockdown in order to keep yourself fit and healthy.  The problem is that I didn’t do much exercise before lockdown.  In fact, my life wasn’t really all that different before lockdown to now, except that I went to coffee shops and ate less.

In the first week of lockdown, I started doing online yoga again for the first time in months. I also did the ‘soothing stretching exercises’ recommended by a video I found on Amazon Prime, aimed at ‘those with chronic pain caused by conditions such as fibromyalgia’.  These exercises appeared very gentle but the instructor was secretly an evil witch – I woke up the following morning feeling like I’d been wrung out by a beefy Victorian washerwoman. That instructor clearly had a short, fat poppet with badly cut hair and glasses in her back pocket.  Twenty minutes of these so-called ‘soothing stretches’ managed to inflame my entire body (and not in a good way). I spent the following three or four days hobbling round like a professional hypochondriac, convinced I’d got Covid-19 as every part of my body hurt.

However, a fortnight later, I started going for walks.  Counter-intuitive as it might seem, spending all my daylight hours, and quite a few night-time ones too, typing at a laptop tends to make me a tad stiff. Who knew?  Mother Nature was also being either exceptionally kind to the poor creatures confined to their houses and gardens, or exceptionally cruel, depending on your perspective. The weather was gorgeous.  My husband had been taking daily walks down to the local park and reservoir since lockdown began, adopting sensible social distancing measures of course.  So I decided to accompany him.

About ten minutes into every walk, my back started hurting.  I was sure I’d seen one of those van Tulleken twin doctors proving that exercise could cure chronic pain better than pills, and that was on TV so it must be true.  Therefore, I knew I only had to persevere and the pain would ease up.  

It didn’t. It got worse. So I came up with a genius idea: I would take the painkillers an hour before I went on the walk, giving them time to start working, and that would keep the worst of the pains at bay during the walk. If I did this for a week or so, I figured that my body’s natural alignment and muscle strength would return and I could stop taking the pills. 

After one week, I went for a walk without a paracetamol or ibuprofen crutch, and guess what?  My back ache returned with a vengeance!  Traipsing downhill through the wood near our house, I felt as if a goblin was walking behind me and hammering on the muscles below my waist with a lump hammer.

                                             

Well, it just hasn’t had enough time to work yet, I thought.  

A week later, I was mentally refreshed – the bluebells and wild garlic in the woods really are stunning, and the reservoir is a thing of true beauty under a bright blue spring sky, and the people who were keeping a safe distance away from us were all friendly and cheerful.  Who’d’ve thought a pandemic could be so pleasant?  So I stopped taking the painkillers again.

Rumpel-lumphammer was back, this time adding extra resonance by gently plucking my sciatic nerve with a pair of pliers.  As I lumbered down the hill, tripping over tree roots and cursing the van Tulleken twins ('Damn the van Tullekjen twins, however east-on-the-eye they might be! Call themselves doctors? They're nothing but bloody charlatans! And I bet this tree trunk is covered with coronavirus!), my knees made a sound like an old grandfather clock winding down.

So, here's what I achieved by two weeks of exercise:  

• hay fever due to the bluebells and wild garlic 
• a limp worthy of the hero of a 1940s romance 
• I’d ingested more painkillers than I would normally take in six months.  

So now I’m back to a ten minute limp down the canal path when no one is about, and fifteen minutes a day of ‘Yoga For extremely-unfit-middle-aged-beginners-with-fibromyalgia-and-the-kind-of -bodies-that-just-won’t-do-what-they’re-told  With Adriene’. Adriene is a woman whose video-ed yogic-contortions have impressed me in the past, though I am a long, long way from emulating them. She’s an American and talks too much which often makes me very tense with irritation (which is the opposite of what yoga should achieve), but I’ve learned to distract myself by counting the number of clichés she can pack into one yogic position (I counted twenty-eight this morning).

                                                      

Don’t get the wrong idea. I do sometimes move away from the laptop.  I have a frequent compulsion to bake cakes and talk to my little nephew by Google Hangouts, and I am teaching a couple of private tutees by Skype (yes, I am now able to use ‘multiple’ online video calling apps), and there is housework (which P is doing most of at present because I am in such pain – when I iron, I have to prop myself up against the table and take a ten minute breather between each item). 

And there is of course the ten hours of procrastination I have to fit in each day.

Well, someone has to do it!