Parkrun, Devon
Sometimes the hardest thing about running is getting out the door, especially in the mornings. It’s so much easier to roll over and go back to sleep, or stick on some toast and promise yourself you’ll go another time. Knowing there are hundreds of other people waiting to run with you in your local park can be a big help.
Parkrun is a phenomenon. More than 1 million people in the UK have taken part in one at some point. Every Saturday at 9am, in 414 parks across the country, people of all ages, shapes and sizes run together over a three-mile course.
My nearest one is the aptly named Parke parkrun in Devon. I’ve been meaning to go for months. Finally, on Saturday, I took the plunge.
For beginners, joining a race or running with others can be intimidating. But parkrun is set up to cater for British awkwardness. While it’s all very welcoming, if you don’t want to talk to anyone, you don’t have to. The whole thing is a template for simple efficiency. Register online, print out a barcode (which you hand in at the end), and turn up in time for the start, where volunteers will explain the route and how everything works. It’s also completely free.
Parke parkrun is in a country park and, it being August, there are lots of holidaymakers joining it. It’s that much fun you’ll even want to do it when you’re on holiday.
I usually plough a lonely furrow around the lanes near my house on a Saturday morning, but now I’m suddenly in the excited throng, milling around, limbering up. Proper running. Once we start, everything passes in a mad blur as we dash off through the woods. There’s something about being in a group that seems to make running easier – the movement of the other runners, the sense of being carried along in this flow of bodies, of being part of the charge.
Be warned, though, you may end up running faster than you intended. I had planned to enjoy the run at a nice gentle pace but, halfway around, my competitiveness got the better of me and I started trying to pass as many people as possible. The organisers say, pointedly, that parkrun is a run, not a race, but I’m not listening. I’m Mo Farah, making my move up the field. In the end, I finish in 4th place – just outside the medals. Adharanand Finn
Nordic walking, Edinburgh
First things first: the weather is lovely. Rich, gold evening light, bone-dry grass, and – OK, you can’t have everything – a naughty August wind careering through the flat expanse of Edinburgh’s Inverleith park. Still, we’re talking about an outdoor fitness class in Scotland. The fact that the wind isn’t studding my face with a hundred tiny needles of rain makes it a resounding success before I have even strapped my poles to my hands.
Ah, yes, the poles. I am Nordic walking, which is about as inoffensive as outdoor fitness gets. It looks a bit like cross-country skiing without the skis. But if you don’t like Nordic walking, you don’t like life. It is a wholesome, unintimidating, cheery activity – the kind I imagine allotment owners going in for – and it uses 46% more calories than normal walking and 90% of working muscles. Also, it’s Scandinavian, so it must be good.
One woman in our group – a four-week beginners’ course – is on crutches and is Nordic walking to strengthen her leg. In another weekly class at Portobello beach, two of the walkers are in their 80s. Most Nordic walkers are women. As for me, I have never done an outdoor fitness class in my life and I am usually the person walking their dog past the uptempo group doing star jumps on a Tuesday morning, pondering the point of all this hands-in-the-air bootcampery.
But, by the time we are striding across the park with our poles softly patting the ground in our wake, I am having a blast. Dogs come and sniff our pole tips when we stop for a quick debrief. The sun dips lower in the sky. There is birdsong, laughter, the warm glow of smugness that all exercise induces.
Trevor, Edinburgh’s only Nordic walking instructor, took it up four years ago and is an excellent advert for its benefits: kind, chipper, slim. He talks us through the technique, which is harder than it looks; I keep “spotty-dogging” (when your arms go out of synch with your legs and you look like a tool). No one minds. Nordic walking is about embracing your inner spotty dog. We head for a distant corner of the park and Nordic walk up and down a precipitous hill that I would never have otherwise attempted. Beside us, another group sprints up and down the verge. I suddenly become aware that Inverleith park – a typically genteel Edinburgh green space, with its painterly views of the castle, and pond used by model boat clubs – is teeming with outdoor fitness classes. Boot camps, football games, jogging groups, buggy runs; half of the city seems to be here.
In such an environment, it’s hardly surprising that no one finds our merry band of Nordic walkers annoying. Rather, people smile at us fondly as they might if we were a hi-vis group of nursery children holding hands. One elderly man on a bench shouts: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” as we stride past, then as an afterthought, “CAN I COME?” It’s all so very … nice. Chitra Ramaswamy
Project Awesome, London
As I complete 10 press ups on a stranger’s back, high-five several people I have only just met and crab-walk painfully up Primrose Hill for the sixth time, I glance at my watch. It’s 6.58am.
My aching muscles – most of which I didn’t know existed until now – are waving white flags and, somehow, I have a mouthful of dried mud and grass, yet it appears I have only been doing this for 28 minutes. Oh well, I think, only another 32 to go …
I’m here because of the success of Project Awesome, a collective of high-energy extroverts providing “free, fun, badass workouts in your city” (currently that means London, Bristol and Edinburgh). Their classes start at a time I am as likely to stay up until as get up for, and put a twist on your typical outdoor exercise class: along with all the running and burpees, there are frequent hugs, high-fives and, er, bum slaps. There’s also chanting, cake-eating and more hugs. Did I mention the hugs? There are a lot of hugs.
Things kick off with a minute’s litter picking (the hilltop is a mess of broken glass and lager cans at 6am) before the 50 or so attendees begin a running circuit that involves various touchy-feely exercises such as joint one-legged squats. If this all seems daunting for a newcomer, the Project Awesome team ensure that it is not – newbies are made to feel especially welcome right up until the end when I am forced inside the centre of a massive group – you guessed it – hug. You have to quickly get au fait with other people’s sweat: the smell, the feel, the taste.
But it’s fun, even for people like me, who don’t particularly relish early starts, enforced extroversion or being required to slap strangers on the arse. The surreal atmosphere means that the workout is far less painful than it could be and several people tell me how they had previously been spending around £60 a month on outdoor exercise courses before they found Project Awesome (which promises it will never charge).
Yet, despite what seems to be an altruistic project that encourages friendship as much as fitness, Project Awesome is currently at the centre of controversy. Locals are up in arms that the “spiritual” atmosphere of Primrose Hill at 6am has been broken by chanting, Lycra-clad “hipsters” and have been trying to get the class shut down. One report said the situation had become so serious that Liam Gallagher had been forced to stop running there. Won’t anyone think of the poor Britpop frontmen?
It all seems pretty daft to me – the noise is minimal, local cafes get a boost (post-workout coffee is encouraged) and the place gets tidied up for free; surely the people leaving broken glass lying around would make better targets for ire? Besides, I wouldn’t fancy trying to repress the enthusiastic types behind Project Awesome. “See you next week!” my newly acquired exercise buddies shout as I head off. Little do they know that I don’t get out of bed before 9am for anything less than a Guardian byline. Still, I spend the next 12 hours feeling pumped up and high as a kite. Awesome, in fact. Tim Jonze
British Military Fitness, Brighton and Hove
The other writers on this page are going to say that their fitness classes were tough, but they will be wrong. This was tough. This one. The toughest I think I’ve ever done.
British Military Fitness (BMF) was one of the first outdoor fitness clubs, and is now one of the biggest. “Old-fashioned army physical training,” park manager Les told me to expect. “We still come if the rain’s sideways. But it’s not boot camp. We don’t bawl in people’s faces.” Lisa, Matt and Jason will be the instructors. All are current or ex-military. There are about 30 of us civilians, an even mix of men and women. David, 50, has been coming with his wife for two years to complete his weight-loss programme. Jilly, 36, likes being outdoors and hates gyms. “It’s all poncing around in there.”
We take numbered bibs from a bucket, coloured blue through red up to green to denote our fitness level. After years of football, I fancy myself a red, but there is only a blue 14 left. It turns out to suit me. We begin with a quick jog, followed by some team games passing heavy bags around and doing squat thrusts, sit-ups, press-ups, burpees (a kind of jumping squat thrust) and bastardos (I was tired by then, I forget). Afterwards, Matt takes the green group and the rest go with Jason and Lisa. We run uphill with the bags (“your injured mate”). We form ranks and teams and compete to do our squat thrusts and press-ups and so on faster than each other.
This is what I didn’t expect: there are literally no breaks at all. We never rest. Even while the rules of a new game are explained, we have to hold ourselves in the plank position, or do more squats or lunges or something. The reward for finishing each task is the next one. We are always behind, always struggling, always being kindly but loudly told to work harder, as we grunt through the weed smoke and bemused stares of passersby. I can stop if I feel I can’t go on. I’ve been told that. But it isn’t made easy. That’s why BMF is different: you find you’re more or less forced to do it.
Some of the compulsion comes from comradeship. Working in teams, or even in a pair, makes me want to find another press-up from somewhere, because my mate just did. The rest comes from friendly shouting and punishment, for losing or for doing the wrong thing. Shattered, when I put my hands on my hips to rest, Lisa makes the whole group do three burpees, “courtesy of number 14”. When David breaks another rule by telling me what I did wrong, we have to do three more. Sometimes the prize for winning is choosing the punishment for the losers. “We beast them,” Lisa chuckles afterwards, “but there’s always a bit of humour.” I think BMF is fantastic – now it’s over. I may well come back. Leo Benedictus
Our Parks, London
It’s somewhere in the middle of my second plank exercise that the trees stop helping to distract me. So far I have star-jumped until I was red in the face, done three rounds of sit-ups – twisting and turning like a fish on a line – and lunged across the black tarmac of the multiuse court for so long my thighs felt like they might burst into flame. Through it all, my teacher has been patient and gently encouraging. But it was the novelty of staring at the blue sky instead of a speckled ceiling tile or the horrors of a gym mirror that kept me going.
Even when my aching abs got in the way of the bliss of being outdoors, there were diversions in the park – the children kicking a football, teenagers gossiping, someone smoking a spliff – to focus on rather than ticking away the seconds of the plank.
None of the other park users seem to mind me puffing and panting in the corner of the playing courts. This might be because the classes are free and open to everyone. Chantal, my instructor, is from Our Parks, an initiative that works with councils and development agencies to put on classes in open spaces around London. The company was set up by Born Barikor, a former athlete from a council estate in Tower Hamlets, who wanted to create a way for people on lower incomes to access exercise classes.
Currently there are 200 on offer through the company’s website – from yoga to boot camps – and the organisation is hoping to expand further afield. The one I have joined is in Alexandra Road park, a playground-heavy strip of beautiful green lawns and landscaped gardens in the middle of the brutalist Alexandra and Ainsworth estate in north London.
Chantal explains that the residents’ association wanted a class to help the mothers on the estate stay healthy – and she usually has at least eight women attending. Children are welcome to play alongside their exercising parents and the ex-City worker shows me picture of her last session, with three babies along for the ride. But today, thanks to the 28C heat and school holidays, it is just me having what amounts to a personal training session.
During winter, she tells me, she has had a couple of sessions where the group has been snowed on. Some classes are moved indoors when it gets cold to avoid people giving up. As I gingerly get to my feet and feel my legs wobble below me, I have to admit I am hooked. I gave up the gym a few years ago when I realised that running outside made me much happier than staring at a screen indoors. But I have been looking for a strength class to kick me properly into shape – now I just have to find one that doesn’t involve the plank. Homa Khaleeli
‘We still come if the rain’s sideways’ – how Britain fell in love with outdoor fitness
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