Jonny McCambridge: The loneliness (and sore legs) of the long-distance gym runner

After struggling gamely for a few minutes, I decide to summon help. I shout to my son. It is a call I hoped not to have to make for a few decades yet.

“Can you give me a hand son? I can’t get out of bed!”

My condition is self-afflicted. Last week, I joined a gym. My wife cautioned me to start slowly. I dismissed her concerns as nugatory. Now, my son is supporting me in the task of standing upright.

There are many things in life that move in cycles. I have lost count of the number of times that I have taken out a gym membership.

The established pattern is that I will attend enthusiastically and regularly for a period (this can range from months to years) before my attention wanes. Then I will continue to pay the membership without attending before I finally get around to cancelling it.

While the accusation may be that the pattern shows an absence of learning, I do not accept it as evidence of folly. Every previous time I have joined a gym it has helped my physical and mental condition. The problem is in maintaining the discipline and stamina to go.

I am conscious that my level of physical fitness is currently worse than it has ever been. I have also found myself working a lot of late shifts recently. This gives me empty time during the day in which I am often idle. The accompanying sense of waste has a deleterious effect on my mental health. After discussing my concerns with family, we decided the gym might help.

The first visit was a toe-dipping venture. My wife accompanied me, and we spent some time familiarising ourselves with the machines and equipment. Ten minutes on the cross-fit trainer, a few light weights gingerly lifted, and a light go on the exercise bike.

I was just beginning to develop a sweat when my wife advised that was enough for a preliminary session, reminding me that I hadn’t worked out in a while.

On the second occasion I went alone, albeit with the departing promise that I would be sensible. I spotted a free treadmill and decided I would warm up with a light jog. I planned to do 10 minutes at a gentle pace. That was honestly my intention.

However, as soon as the machine whirred into life, some deep latent memory resurfaced. When I was a younger man, I would run on the treadmill. My habit then was to go non-stop for an hour at as fast a pace as I could bear. Once that thought had popped into my head and without a moderating influence nearby, I was doomed.

It is a strange sort of obstinance that compels a man in his 50s to attempt to prove that he can still achieve a physical feat that he managed three decades earlier. The counter arguments to this sort of psychosomatic nonsense are obvious. My fitness levels were much clearly better then, I was carrying substantially less weight, my muscles were younger and fresher.

However, with logic and wisdom set aside, I knew from early on that there was no force, no amount of pain to be endured, which would remove me from that running machine in anything less than 60 minutes.

The other rules of the endurance challenge quickly came back to me. The run must be completed on an incline, which gets steeper as the minutes pass.

A theoretical target of kilometres will be set that I must cover in the hour. And the key one – start at a decent pace and get faster as I go. The speed that I set the machine to can go up, but it must never ever go down. I groaned audibly as this last law was recalled.

There is perhaps no time which passes as slowly as that on an exercise machine when the clock is being watched. I saw other men and women, around my age, climb on and off the machines, run for a few minutes before desisting.

I saw them chatting easily together as I plodded on breathlessly and miserably. I envied those to whom the gym represented a place of gathering, a social lubricant, rather than a weapon to beat oneself over the head.

The minutes passed torturously. The sweat began to sting my eyes. I caught a sideways glance of myself in the long mirror on the wall. A pretty sight it was not. I grabbed at my water bottle in desperate search of hydration and spilt its contents all over my top.

I reached for my towel and dropped it to the ground as I almost fell over. I spent a lot of time staring at my feet where I pondered the fact that my stinginess means I have been wearing the same pair of trainers for a quarter of a century. As I plodded on it seemed that the already substantial holes in my gutties opened even wider in front of my eyes, until I might as well have been running in my bare feet.

Somehow, against all logic, I completed the hour still in an upright position. While my legs were rubbery as I climbed off the treadmill, the sense of relief at completing the challenge warded off any sense of approaching physical adversity.

It was later in the night that the danger signs emerged. I was aware blisters had developed on the soles of my feet, my hip joints seemed in need of oil and my thighs and calves felt as if they had been pounded with hammers. I went to bed fearing that what was uncomfortable in the evening would surely be excruciating by the following morning.

I was right.