The Story So Far

Fitness. It's more than exercise. More than diet. It's a lifestyle. How do you define something that's constantly evolving? Well, you start at the beginning, and try and track the pressures that have influenced that evolution. So, here's some context from the past 30 years...

So, I was born in Edinburgh. Maybe it's in this picture, maybe not. We left when I was 3 so I can't say I remember.

The next 10 years are slightly more relevant. Growing up in the countryside meant running through the fields and up and down the lanes. It's one of these houses here:

That, combined with family holidays spent camping and occasional weekends away in even more rural areas, led to a love of the outdoors. Not that I enjoyed being dragged along on hikes in the rain, but running about and clambering on things was always an enjoyable diversion. My first school was understandably small, we didn't get to the point of formalised sports. I wasn't even in the main village so didn't have enough neighbours to play football (soccer). We'd run around the playground during breaks with our made-up games. Notably, through a bureaucratic quirk I also ended up getting twice the amount of swimming lessons that most people got. It was an infrequent but pleasant family leisure activity.

Children can grow on anything, but the food consumed is likely to be habit-forming. We were lucky I guess in getting home-cooked meals, including occasional home-grown produce. Mostly though we got our main meal at school. Again though, this was a relatively small scale, without multiple options. They cooked a proper 'balanced' dish. My parents in retrospect were good about not giving me the means to supplement this with my own purchases - which when they came inevitably tended towards sweets. I did not enjoy most vegetables or 'real' food - I was picky enough to refuse to eat anything that still had bones. But though I complained, for the most part I ate well. One other detail that may be salient. Before I was born, my parents were living in Africa. This resulted in a habit which has propogated throughout our whole family to this day to base meals on a mountain of rice. There's been considerable diversification, but these dishes (and similarly with pasta) were considerably more prevalent in my youth than I have since learned is typical.

The end of this period covers the move to secondary school at 11. We now had a cast of thousands, and were introduced to all sorts of standard English grammar school PE cliches. We had expansive fields for our games lessons, there's even pictures online...

While I'm sure there was other sports, my abiding memories are of wheezing through cross country runs (at this point I was still somewhat asthmatic) and learning the basics of rugby, ably assisted by the bully who had shown up my last year of primary school and who evidently relished the tackle more than I did. Throw in the communal showers and I did not find a love for sports being kindled. I wasn't particularly good, and didn't particularly have fun. Compared to my other classes where I was respected, it's no surprise my interests veered elsewhere. To be fair, I still played back home, though there was less time once we got to and from school. I was also now cycling over the hills - including occasionally as far out as school which was about 10 miles away. But what could have been a great opportunity to develop physical abilities was arguably being missed.

This was compounded then with my first taste of freedom in buying my own lunch. As should surprise no-one, I managed to get to the front of the queue every day of the week by virtue in part of my membership of the band and choir (which rehearsed at lunchtime) and on other days by my suggestion to the head librarian that I could help better if I finished lunch early. Because the library was where I spent my free time. So what did I now eat for my main meal?

This, but lower quality. Burger, chips and beans. With a can of coke and a kit-kat. Every. Day. And I loved it.

With 5 formative years at school left, things then took a turn that would be profound and cement the above trends in interesting ways. We moved. Here.

So, what impact did London have? First off, no dedicated playing fields at school. We cycled through several sports we had to travel for. The only one I remember is badminton, because that was the only one I would consent to go to - I wasn't too bad at it, and there was minimal opportunity for turning it into a contact sport. The bully problem was magnified as I was now a complete outsider, without even the refuge of the classroom as the teachers were just as confused as the other students over the fact that I actually learned things. So, minimal activity at school, which was a mere 5 minute walk from home. I still cycled - as there were actually places to get to. At my peak I covered 3000 miles in a year - the year before I learned to drive.

I did find other outlets though. Through a friend I was motivated to join the air cadets. I wanted to give a good account of myself and all things considered this was a positive environment to try to do pushups and situps and run around in the dark pretending to shoot people. I got myself a pullup bar to put up in my door at home, but could barely move, nor figure out how to progress. I was even interested in signing up for the Nijmegan march, but at the first training walk I ended the first day after 10 miles blistered, chafed, and essentially immobile. Depending on the environment, the will was there, but my body wasn't really up to it any more. In retrospect one other key fitness-related feature of this period was learning to become a glider pilot, for reasons that will be explained later.

I can't remember what happened for lunch. I'm pretty sure when we moved we switched to having our main meal at home in the evenings and I took a packed lunch to school. My final 2 years though when I changed to another school for sixth form I know what I had for lunch. Technically I had it at the first break in the morning. Every day.

And I'd now graduated to a full bottle of coke, and a tube of Smarties. And this was back when Smarties had real E-numbers and letters on the lids. Let's add this to the infinitely more accessible shops and increases in allowance and assume that outside of my meals I was eating plenty of unhealthy snacks. For reference, breakfast throughout all this time at home was most likely toast, sometimes cereal.

So that's how things were when I left home. I had ambitions of being fit enough to serve in the Armed Forces. I enjoyed getting dirty. I could cycle a fair bit, swim pretty well, and didn't hate playing badminton. But I was making consistently poor food choices whenever I could and getting rounder all the time. Time for a change of scene.

(At some point we'll get to pictures I actually took)
University, so much going on, all of it within a mile or two. Of course all the sports clubs were too intimidating, I even avoided the badminton club as I'd never played competitively or even with any real rules and I wasn't sure if I'd be welcome. I was confident enough however to join the football team. Well, the 4th team. With all the other people who liked muddy fields and not expecting to win. Other distractions prevented me from really missing out on any regular physical activity. There was a period of several months at least where I took up jogging. Pounding along weekly with a friend in a miserably uncomfortable way - running would have been too charitable a word for the activity. Around this time I also acquired a set of adjustable dumbbells. But I had no idea what to do with them and picking them up didn't seem to get any easier.

I did finally start to use my upper body for something though. I got a convenient summer job.

As you can see, none of those boats are going the right way. It may have been more about technique than strength, but for a couple of years I travelled up and down the river in the summer months more than anyone else. You'd never see my boat in this situation. I was full of good intentions. But lacked the knowledge or support to implement any of them well.

Of course, you must be wondering how my diet fared, now I had complete autonomy. To be honest, my meals were good. I cooked, and did pretty well compared to most students. But I also now washed everything down with 2l bottles of coke, day after day, and munched through 200g blocks of chocolate as I sat hunched in front of my computer. I never related my lack of success or enthusiasm for physical activities as deriving from my diet, but I don't know if I'd've been able to counter the emotional forces that encouraged my binges even so. Despite that, and perhaps because I maintained an interest in being active, I never went over 220lb. And I know that because that was the limit taking the front seat in a Grob.

See? Relevant. As it was I never actually passed my spin tests as the instructors simply couldn't get it into a proper spin with the amount of ballast I brought on board. If I had a hard line, it was that I wasn't going to get too heavy to fly. That probably counted for something.

From here we can skip daintily into the post-grad years. Here everything became more focused, and generally less melodramatic. My last summer of undergrad I discovered people that friends of mine pretty much made up the entire college Ultimate frisbee team. So I joined. And had fun in competitive team sports for the first time. And wasn't actually too bad. It helps joining a team that then goes on to be undefeated for the season I guess, and I can't take all the credit for that. So impassioned was I that at my next uni, I started a team, got enough people together and got to not only play several times a week, but go to tournaments and do all the fun stuff I wish I'd been doing years earlier. With the high turnover of a post-grad uni, it was hard work, but the club is still going strong 5 years after I left.

That's not all. If the foreshadowing wasn't enough, here's a surprise. I started playing badminton regularly. The uni had an informal club which played 3 hours, 3 times a week. And most weeks I was on court all that time. On the minus side, I never really overcame my upper body weakness, but on the plus side I never had to worry about my clearances going long. Over these few years, I also joined an outdoors group that took me on weekends away to go hiking, on purpose this time. It took some getting used to but the discomforts of my teenage years were passing by as I improved and started enjoying the whole deal. My last summer before I submitted my thesis I either walked, ran or cycled to campus, 5 miles from my house, or else went to swim in the morning, pretty much every day. If I wasn't strong, I was at least active, and moving my weight back down. And really building a pretty solid base of fitness. Thing I could do regularly, daily even, for fun.

So did I change my diet? Bad habits are bad habits, although I now bemoaned every time I got in the car to drive to the nearest shop just to buy cookies or chocolate. Didn't stop me though. By my final year I was doing much better on the orthodox view of healthy, taking packed meals rather than buying food on site, cooking pasta salads and lean chicken breast etc. This was when I first started following any real prescribed Diet. But staying up all night coding could undermine even the strongest will, and mine was nowhere near that strong yet. Enough time had passed now for me to tie a high bodyfat percentage to lack of progress with relationships. Suffice to say the drive to change myself wasn't entirely noble. This first sustained effort got me down to 182lb, but never any lower.

Moving on again, we have some more experiences that have to be recounted for their aggregation into my lifestyle. First, through the outdoors group mentioned before, was my 'expedition' to Nepal. A culmination of many things, a 3-day hike into the Himalayas, followed by a 6 day raft back out.

Physically I was up to the task. What was interesting however was learning another food culture (this was my first time outside Europe). Aside from the details of what they ate (and how fit and strong the guides were, despite not having protein shakes to hand) I was most influenced by the habit of only eating 2 meals. This was revelatory at the time, and factored heavily into my eventual foray into intermittent fasting. I may also have learned a thing or two from killing a goat on the beach.

This adventure was closely followed up by a 3-month trip to South Africa teaching kids to play frisbee. This was finally an opportunity to spend the whole day being active, if at a modest level and again without strength so much as endurance involved. And the food provided here was neither terribly nutritious or filling, and we had opportunities to supplement it ourselves. An addiction to quality biltong notwithstanding, the net effect was deleterious to health. Some records were less flattering than others.

I did get to spend some time though seeing how the poorer locals typically ate though, which was again quite fascinating. And I didn't always look so bad...

After this, I started gainful employment. My opportunities for playing now without a campus were severely limited. I mostly tried to combat this through judicious use of Wii Fit. And Just Dance. I was knuckling down on the diet though, building on my experiences abroad, experimenting with just a morning and evening meal, adding new dishes to my repertoire, trying unconventional foods for breakfast, and perhaps most significantly resolving to quit sugary drinks. And I did. I just stopped. Went a whole year, and for the most part didn't really miss them. The headaches and so on I'd always used as an excuse to imbibe disappeared pretty much straight away. My default drink now in any situation was water, and so it has remained. And it works perfectly well.

It surely felt different at the time, but this slow grinding of the gears in retrospect didn't appear to deliver much. Without hard figures on changing body composition, I forget about how hard simple activities used to be. How different would I be had I not kept making my imperfect way towards a brighter future? I don't know, but I'm sure there's a hundred other turning points so obscure as to be forgotten that were just as intrinsic to building the foundation to do the things I'm doing now. Not that we're there yet, just 2 more years to cover...

Hello USA! Hello winters where you genuinely can't go outside to play half the time. Hello Ultimate scene where you can play pickup every day of the week in summer, but none of it competitive. Hello junk food culture, and a firm decision not to be seduced by it. And hello foul chocolate and unsatisfying baked goods. For the record I did spend my first year driving out to a (hard to find) badminton club regularly, but it was just too far to drive over summer when I had other options, and the habit broke. After the first few months I settled in to some serious diet evaluations and measurement tracking. Starting with actually lifting weight for the first time seriously (though on machines) at the little apartment gym - and eating all the things. Through the slow carb approach which broke my dependence on grains, and other programs I forget now that introduced fasting on a more serious level. Here's a pretty chart.

In fact it's only now looking at it again that I can see the progress of the year following this. You can see how closely my waist (and chest) measurement varied with weight. However, while I'm by no means at my lightest currently, I measure a couple of inches less than at the equivalent weight 18 months ago. These diets, when maintained, delivered a drop in weight, but wasn't revealing rippling muscles underneath.

My second winter, I finally caved in and got a gym membership, after years of believing I could do everything I wanted to get fit outdoors. I got given my first program, mainly dumbbell work, that I went through and got a measure of where my weaknesses were. I also joined a number of classes, though they generally fell under the category of 'aerobics'. This is also when I went primal, which has been my guiding dietary philosophy ever since. This might as well mark the start of when I seriously thought of fitness as something to train for, rather than something one acquired as a by-product of doing fun things. That working to become fitter was a lifestyle choice. I also discovered I was relatively good at running, at least on the basis of running to the gym which was less than a mile away. By american standards though this was noteworthy, and I was persuaded to enter a race.

A few months later these same people persuaded me to run Tough Mudder, with only 6 weeks notice. I wasn't satisfied that our 'boot camp' was going to help me any more, curling and pressing 10lb dumbbells over and over. I introduced my friends to the joys of running about and scrambling over playground equipment, and I took to the trail to how this running thing would hold up. What eluded me was that one pull-up. The component of strength I was seriously lacking to navigate the obstacles. I tried, but had nowhere near enough time. This had however led me to Stronglifts, and I flirted with the Smith machine during my preparation. I wouldn't get to use a real barbell until I found another gym, after the race. I mentioned I liked getting dirty right?

This may be where many recall my entry to Fitocracy - it was my profile pic for quite a while. I'd actually joined a few months earlier though, to track my sporadic running. However, it was perfectly placed for my full-blown transition to lifting. 8 months later and I'm finally dialling my diet back in to support my activities, while once again looking to make that final breakthrough and see the definition I've been working on. It'll still take time, and may go down as the slowest cut in history, but I've had some fun along the way. And maybe things do look a little different these days.