At last, after many weeks of trudging through a dense jungle of commitments, the weary traveller reached a small clearing. He marvelled at the sudden sense of light, and clarity. “I have been unable to see, and thus I have been invisible”, he mused.
It’s been an eventful few weeks, with so much to write about that I’ve not had the time to log it. Now, finally, I seem to have arrived at a natural break between one list of overpowering assignments and the next. Best grab the chance to skim off and serve up the more newsworthy bits.
We were off to a health spa last time I passed this way. At Ragdale Hall, I found that relaxation can be surprisingly hard work, should you choose it to be. In this padded prison of pleasure, you’re encouraged to take the easy sentence. But contrarians like me opt to make life a bit more challenging. The reward for this recalcitrance is an exhaustion as sweet as any honeymooner’s.
A swarm of agreeable flunkies descended to greet us on the Thursday afternoon. One took our bags, another the car keys.
And so the stroking had begun. It never let up. As the car was being parked, we were taken for an introductory coffee by a sparkly-toothed blonde. Then we were led to our accommodation. Strange to have an upstairs bedroom — I don’t think I’ve stayed in a split-level hotel suite before. In fact, I can remember only once being in a suite, which was that astonishingly cheap place in Las Vegas this year.
We chuckled again at our good fortune, and set about demolishing the contents of the fruit bowl. As we did so, we studied our scheduled activities. M was majoring on cosmetic reinvention, while I was hoping to find my miracle cure in the Fitness Complex, as that seemed to describe my condition pretty well.
Alas, the silver bullet I sought must have rolled behind one of the very few bits of equipment I didn’t engage with over the next 48 hours.
The campaign started on a very gentle incline indeed, with a class called Relax & Unwind. Here I was the only man among 15 women of assorted shapes and ages. We lay on mats in one of the fitness studios. The lights were extinguished, and as the throaty siren in the black leotard stepped us through our journey, the sonorous New Age music began oozing gently from the speakers, like some lethal miasma. Harps, pan pipes, and a reverb-enhanced piano rang out their stately arpeggios. It was a musical duvet, beneath which we rapidly lost contact with the world of urgent email and traffic wardens and annual objectives.
I have a confession to make: I quite like New Age muzak. I once voluntarily listened to the same CD on a continuous loop for about 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, for almost 9 months. One day, I will impart the circumstances. It’s an excellent story, and was the unintentional beginning of this very website.
Bur back to Ragdale. It would be easy to ridicule this opening session, but the stretches and progressive muscle relaxation were genuinely therapeutic. It was immediately followed by my ‘advanced fitness assessment’. Strenuous enough, but the result was surprisingly positive. It seems my heart and VO2 max are way above average, while pretty much everything else hovers around the unexceptional. Even body fat was described as “just on the higher side of normal” which OK, I concede, does sound a tad euphemistic.
Final exercise of that first day was a gentle meander round the gym for half an hour to fill in the time before the first of my three free treatments. It has to be said, I found these experiences rather… poncey, and not quite all they were made out to be. It’s true that there are worse things in life than being massaged by attractive young women in a semi-darkened room, as the pan pipes and harps and reverby piano ring out their stately arpeggios. But not all of my cynicism wafted away along with the shoulder tension and wrinkles and dry skin, or whatever it was I was being relieved of.
There was just time for a drift around the various heat rooms in the spa before dinner, which was excellent, but which dealt my energy a fatal blow. I did manage a post-prandial sprawl in one of the ‘quiet lounges’, which was indeed totally silent apart from the regular clucking sound of an elderly lady as she frowned over the Daily Telegraph. Ragdale looks like it started life as some sort of stately home, so it’s no surprise to find it on the chintzy side of traditional. At times it can seem like a fusty forest of standard lamps, and fathomless old sofas. Not my ambience of choice, but in the circumstances, it seems churlish to complain about this padded cell with the smiley face. Back in the room(s), I could barely keep my eyelids hoisted for Question Time, and was delighted to crawl between the sheets of the gargantuan bed at last.
Next morning at 7:45, the door bell rang. Yes, our rooms have a door bell. Breakfast is delivered to every resident: a system I didn’t feel minded to complain about, even if the portions were a bit measly for muesli. Breakfast is the best meal of my day, so I was thrilled to get an introduction to Atholl Brose. According to the recipes I’ve researched since, this traditional Scottish breakfast, or dessert, should contain a large tot of malt whisky, but unsurprisingly for a health spa, this ingredient was omitted here. It’s essentially oats, honey, cream and raspberries. Not certain just how healthy this is, but for a matinal oatophile like me, boy, did it hit the spot. There was also a small plate of cottage cheese, smoked salmon and grapes. It looked striking, and I think was intended to be a healthier version of bacon and eggs. But without the joy of naughtiness, it didn’t work for me.
A bigger gap before my first booked class would have been better, but at least the fitness ball (a.k.a. Swiss ball, gym ball) class wasn’t too aerobic. Surprisingly tough though. I own a fitness ball but haven’t used it much. My feeble excuse is that I haven’t known what to do with it. OK, so it did come with a 25-minute instructional DVD, and yes, I concede that tapping “swiss ball” and its alternatives into Google will yield approximately 1,500,000 matches, but I really don’t have the time to read 1.5 million web pages in the search for the definitive how-to. Much better to hope to win a trip to a health spa, where one can attend a class.
Again, I was the only man among the dozen or so attendees. As a result, there was some tittering as instructions like “Grab your balls and stand up” were issued by the smirking, but otherwise charming, instructress. If the abdominal pain scale is a telling indicator, the gym ball turns out to be a formidable piece of kit. Forty-five minutes later, I knew I’d been through a workout.
After a 10-minute breather, it was time for the next item on the list: a spinning class. This has been another must-do for too long. I’ve been casually eyeing the spinners at the gym for a while, thinking it looked like a decent piece of torture. Ragdale was a good opportunity to try it out in a non-intimidating environment. So I did.
Memorably, the first spinning class I ever saw was actually during a marathon. May 2004, beneath the enormous shadow of the FC Copenhagen football stadium, we plodded through a tidy park, past an outdoor class of grinning spinners who hollered at us as we hollered at them. I don’t know why we all did this, but it was pretty good-natured.
There are two types of music at Ragdale: I’ve mentioned the harps, pan pipes, and reverb-enhanced piano ringing out their stately arpeggios. That’s one sort. There is also the frantic disco thump, featuring a lady giving birth. At least, that’s what I presume she’s experiencing. The spinning class was 45 minutes of sweat and endurance to the accompaniment of the giving-birth tape. It wasn’t as hard as I’d feared, though I could easily see how much more strenuous it could be in the hands of a yet more demonic instructor. I’m told that spinning can get addictive, but so be it. A spot of aerobic fitness dependency was a risk I was manfully prepared to take. There are worse things to be enslaved by, like heroin, or golf, or X-Factor.
Immediately after this spell of heavy breathing had subsided, I volunteered for some more. This time, a steady spell of intervals on the treadmill. Much better than having to stare at my wobbling frame in a full-length mirror, this time I was faced by a floor-to-ceiling window, and a stunning view of a huge, rolling cornfield. Now and then a tractor would roll past, or someone on foot, purposefully going about his workaday agricultural business. These real people appeared to be oblivious to the bulbous urban types on their exercise machines. We must seem like a bunch of jaded, dispirited rats in a cage. There was something about the juxtaposition of the true, natural world and this fabricated one that I found slightly troubling. But the only human condition I fancied pondering over at this point was my own, bloated one, so I strapped on my ipod and zoned out on U2.
Maybe the treadmill experience was moulding my attitude, but I had a moment of confusing clarity about U2. I don’t often listen to them these days, though I was quite a fan back in the eighties. This was their most recent album, No Line on the Horizon, which I’d bought very cheaply online a while ago, but not listened to much. I was struck by how redundant they sound these days. What are they for exactly? Maybe I should stick with their early stuff. They sounded like they meant it back then.
Twenty minutes of intervals, and it was time for lunch. This was a much more generous meal than breakfast and supper. So generous that they were almost the undoing of me. A buffet in a health spa is quite a gamble.
And so it continued. Two more sessions of fragrant pummelling happened, but I’m struggling to recall what they were. Some sort of moisturising rigmarole, during which I was given a stream of recommendations for future facial conduct. Naturally, I earnestly agreed to this new regime, though discovering that this stuff costs about £50 for 100 ml seems to have triggered an attack of amnesia.
Worth mentioning another curious experience: a Hopi ear candling treatment. Hmmm. Is this just a risible waste of time and money? Or does pushing a hollow candle in your ear and lighting it really suck impurities out of you, clear your sinuses, solve your wax issues, and offer a revitalising, spiritually cleansing experience? The answer, of course, is that it is hokey, in the main. “In the main?” I add that caveat because it’s undeniably therapeutic to lie on a couch in a semi-darkened room, under the silky hands of a pretty girl, while spacey music plays, and…. and with a lighted candle sticking out of your ear. But I don’t think it excessively cynical to believe that the ‘treatment’ doesn’t offer much more than the same benefits that might accrue from lying on a couch in a semi-darkened room, under the silky hands of a pretty girl, while spacey music plays, and…. and without a lighted candle sticking out of your ear. Take my word for it.
Plenty more where that came from, but that’s enough detail for now. A good couple of days, and well worth the £0 we paid for it. Mind you, in the interests of balance, I should mention that half an hour after we left Ragdale, we were in Morrisons in Melton Mowbray, buying a large pork pie and some Kettle Chips.
The spinning has continued. Perhaps it really is addictive. In the intervening fortnight I’ve managed another 4 spin classes, as well as some Pilates, and this morning, something called BodyPump, which was horrible. I’m not a weight-lifting type, and BodyPump is essentially weight-lifting to music. All I got out of it was a sore back and a nasty dose of humiliation as I floundered in an ocean of muscley, smirking ladies.
It’s late, and I must to bed. Tomorrow morning I have an 8 mile race in Guildford. The back problem is mildly worrying. I have to hope it’s just an ache I can run off, and not a strain that could trigger something worse over a hilly 8 mile course. We’ll see. Apart from that, I’m feeling in reasonable condition. The weight continues to dribble off. I’m now 27 pounds lighter than I was in September.
It’s harder to judge where I am with my running because I’ve not done enough of it in the last two weeks. My routine has been disrupted, first by Ragdale, then a few days in Nottingham for work, then this week, a 5-day course. I’ve had to rely on grabbing short bursts of activity whenever the chance has arisen. Hence the gym trips. I have managed 4 runs too, but none longer than 4 miles, and all at night, in the pitch black. This makes a difference, because all I can hope to achieve in those conditions is a steady plod. With no lights beyond the occasional illumination of a car passing in the distance, bumpy country lanes are too dangerous to take risks with.
So I genuinely have no accurate idea how I will deal with tomorrow’s race, which apparently includes a 4-mile hill. My plan is to use it as a bridge from the short runs back into the longer ones, and I’ve no great inclination to think of it as anything more than a mid-length weekend training run.
With only 20 days before the Hyde Park 10K on New Year’s Day, I’m very slightly nervous about how I’ll do. Between now and then, I have at least 4 boozy, Christmassy social events on my calendar, with all the usual risks attached. These risks include weight spikes, lethargy, hangovers, poverty, domestic dissonance, and general pessimism about my chances of slugging it out with Usain Bolt in 2012.
Not much of an advert for drinking, is it?
