My dad couldn’t fathom why I wanted to expend precious energy on exercise

A few weeks ago I went back to the house where I grew up in the North East of England. It was the first time I had seen the interior in 30 years. My childhood bedroom, where I once put up posters of my sports heroes, cut out of comic books, had been transformed into a smart office with a laptop and printer. There was a gleaming bathroom in what had been our “storage room” for knick-knacks. Much of where I lived with my dad, mom, and two older sisters was still familiar to me.

It was outside, at the end of the patio and up four stone steps, that I got the biggest surprise. The garden where, once, six or eight small children were chasing a ball, seemed to have shrunk. Our dream sports theater was now neat and tidy, but it also felt much smaller than in my golden memories.

In the late 1970s, a regular gang would gather here for a chaotic game. We kept patches of mud between the two home goals at each end of the lawn, and if the ball went over the hedge, our neighbor kept it. There were rosebushes to one side into which a young player occasionally fell. Arguments about goals or fouls would break out, someone would go home angry, and we would only disperse after dark. It was football in the winter, spring and autumn, and cricket in the summer. Sometimes, on clear afternoons, my dad would take a break from tending the vegetables and join in briefly if the numbers were lopsided.

On Sunday afternoons, when I was about 10 years old, I would deliver my beloved Timex watch to our doorstep and ask him to time me as I circled the wide market square that overlooked our house. I reached the door again, panting, a few minutes later, desperate to know how it had gone.

Dad, then in his sixties, just couldn’t understand my desire to exercise for the sake of it, to push myself to the physical limit. As he caught his breath, he shook his head and asked, “Why do you want to go bust yourself?”

Even then, I realized that there was an unbridgeable chasm between the way we both viewed exercise. Dad kept fit through his work and for work; I did it by choice, in an artificial or organized way, and for fun.

He worked the land in North Yorkshire for most of his life, leaving school at 12 to work on local farms and later as a gardener at a nursing home. At first, he plowed the rich land with horses. It was hard, physical work, regardless of the weather.

While some of his contemporaries joined teams at local sports clubs on Saturdays, Dad usually worked. He enjoyed sports and, decades later, we would watch endless hours on television together and go to games, but he had little opportunity to practice it, apart from joining us from time to time in the garden.

Dad was a kind and quiet man, with a dry wit. Small in stature, his work made him slim and he had strong arms and shoulders. Only when he retired, at age 65, did he gain enough weight to loosen his belt a bit, much to our derision. When he wasn’t working or attending church on Sundays, he conserved his energy for daily hard work. I remember him coming home from work exhausted and resting in front of the fire with his feet against the fireplace.

So when she had a child late in her life, I couldn’t understand why she wanted to expend precious energy on exercise, and why I chose to run across the neighborhood to get to our door panting. For him, staying fit and strong was never a leisure activity; it was a necessity.

In his later years, Dad used to come to my school’s football games, loyally standing on the sideline with my mother. We were going to see our local team, Middlesbrough, when Jack Charlton was manager of the club. I used to wonder if he wanted to have the opportunities that I enjoyed, to participate in organized sports and join a local team.

Fast-forward four more decades, and I am now able to deliver unwanted advice on modern exercise and fitness regimens to my three children, who are 20, 18, and 15 years old. They all started playing football in Ireland before we moved back to England 11 years ago. Their first sports clubs were in Sandymount, Dublin, and they used to see me go long distance running down the Strand, towards the Nature Reserve and the East Wall.

The boy in the middle, born in Ireland and now 18, heading off to college soon, loves going to the gym with his friends. His protein powders are next to the breakfast cereals in the kitchen. The gym is both a social and physical attraction. He paid the direct debit on his membership – for now – at the same time imploring her to go for a run or a bike ride and “get some fresh air” as an alternative to lifting weights. “Yes, dad,” he says, before heading off to meet his classmates.

The big societal shift in attitudes toward exercise and fitness occurred between my father’s middle age, when he worked outdoors, and mine, mostly in front of a screen. While he never stopped moving, my work days can be static and sedentary. Unlike him, I have the spare hours and funds to plan my leisure and exercise, and then go out and do it.

Now I wonder how my children and their generation will approach physical exercise in the future. Technology will help shape how they choose to stay fit wherever and whenever they want, with immersive offers and apps that provide more on-demand services, with virtual trainers to encourage them from anywhere in the world.

Could skyrocketing costs of living mean that public gyms will see their membership drop in the coming years? Perhaps covid and its lockdowns have embedded the value of local exercise, as we have walked, jogged and biked through our neighborhoods more than ever, sometimes for lack of legal alternatives and the simple desire to get out of the house. We’ve rediscovered the joys of free, local ways to stay fit, and learned to embrace virtual offerings from home. Cycling through South Dublin last weekend I was surprised by the number of small groups of twenty-somethings out for a run.

I still run when I can too, not quite “destroying” myself, though my first half marathon, now coming up, might do just that. I often think of my father, who died in 1990, when I was 21 and he was 78, when I come home breathless.