Keep your chin up

There are few chin-up bars in the parks in England. I’ve only seen one, and that was in a park in a place called West Ham (really). You can do a variety of workouts using the chin-up bar - it builds strength, and you can use it as part of a circuit training programme. In a place where I’ve lived, as Kewl might testify, you can find “exercise stations” along the beach: three sets of chin-up bars, three logs mounted at one end on a shoulder height platform for presses or squats, parallel bars for dips, and 5 concrete sit-up boards to work those abs from a variety of angles. All free for the public to use at their leisure – there’s nothing to stop you if you fancy a workout at 3am in the morning. The lack of public exercise equipment in England is a little sad, I think, but I suppose it shows how much of a priority health is. No wonder the kids here are the fattest in Europe, with 1 in 3 classed as overweight or obese. I find it puzzling – the National Health Service is burdened and in the red, and instead of cutting wastage and spending money to promote healthy living and healthy lifestyles, and providing for people who need treatment for critical illnesses, taxpayers’ money is being diverted into the pockets of consultants who bleed it by the hour to take their time building a useless mega-IT system that isn’t practical, or to fund boob jobs.

That's life for you.

Kids here have it bad. While this illustration is an obvious generalisation, it is far the norm than the minority. The school curriculum is failing and constantly being “dumbed-down”, discipline is bad, and after they leave school they face the daunting decision of whether to go to University and build up a large student debt (£9000 in fees alone for the cheapest courses) just for the possibility of better work prospects, and then trying to get on the ever-drifting property ladder. Teenagers look at what seems a dim future and think the only success they will get is through the lottery of reality TV shows. “I want to be a pop star, this is what I was born to do, this is my dream..." The kids of today, the Ipod/Playstation generation, for whom life revolves around mobile phones, being notorious and anti-social, knife-crime, getting famous without the hard work, being drunk... British kids have the worst upbringing in the developed world. They are Generation F*cked.

Would installing a few chin-up bars correct this? It would be simplistic to think so. That generation might just decide to loop a noose on a bar and hang a member of another gang. But seriously, though, giving kids facilities for exercise and getting them - building fitness, self-esteem and learning teamwork - must be a good thing.

Teaching them to read the misleading food labels properly would be a good thing too. Here, nutritional information is a con, because it labels food by weight instead of by calories as in America. 100g of Flora margarine gives you 531 calories, all of which comes from the 59g of fat (trace carbs and protein). But Flora can market it as 59% fat, when the calories from fat, which is what is really important, are 100%. (1g of fat gives 9 calories: carbs and protein provide 4 calories each) This tactic of labelling fat by weight rather than by caloric percentage is used by many food companies who tout food like oven chips as "less than 10% fat" when they are really closer to 30-40% fat. Wonder why British kids are fat?

Rant over.

Today I did a hilly 10K in 50:40. I’ve not run much because of some pain in the ball of right foot, but it seems to have gone away for a bit after some rest. I did the first 5K in just over 25 minutes at a relaxed pace, and managed to keep up the pace for most of the distance. When going uphill I sometimes do mental countdowns “6-5-4-3-2-1, 5-4-3-2-1, 4-3-2-1, 3-2-1” etc when it gets hard and take a break for maybe 5-10s of walking when I get to 0. It must have worked today because the hill that I normally have to stop about three times on, I made it with one break of walking.

Runner's World has a calculator that is really cool. You can enter a recent race time and get it to do a running programme for you. I put it the lazy pig's version and got asked to run 2 or 3 miles three times a week at 9:30 per mile, even 9:48. So I'll happily take today's just over 8 mins/mile pace, and say a "thank you" to Runner's World for generously supporting my sloth.