No resolutions
If you ever have cause to get your jaw cut in two, I would recommend not having it done immediately following a redundancy notice. After I had jaw surgery in November, I sat in my hospital bed occupied by two things. The first was how I was going to drink the apple juice the nurse had brought me — the consumption of which was a prerequisite for going home — given I could neither sip from a cup nor use a straw, and, more importantly, everything I put in my mouth made me nauseous. Mainly, I was wondering if there was anything I could do to keep my job.
“In sickness,” the late Hilary Mantel wrote about her endometriosis, self-diagnosed at the age of 27, “we can’t avoid knowing about our body and what it does, its animal aspect, its demands.”
At home, clicking around on LinkedIn with my jaw held together by metal plates, I felt less animal than mechanical. (When I bought the syringes that my nurse had suggested I feed myself with, the top Amazon review was a woman praising them for “perfectly clearing the brake fluid from [her] husband’s motorbike.”) Suddenly I was like the sailor in the ship, or a Japanese teenager in a cartoon piloting a suit of steel. The only way to summon up the appetite to squirt soup into my cheek was to chain back-to-back episodes of the food program Somebody Feed Phil.
I had experienced, before, losing and rebuilding fitness. But I had never before been so fit or lost it so suddenly. This manifested in uneven, disorientating ways: when I eventually got back on my bike I found I could still outpace almost any commuter I cared to, but could no longer keep myself warm on the twenty minute ride from Herne Hill, so that one afternoon I arrived home with hands too cold to turn off my own bike lights, uncontrollably weeping not out of self-pity but — I can only guess — as an instinctive, physiological release.
It’s tempting, especially in self-improvement January, to make a neat narrative out of setbacks. Because injury is so common in elite athletes, there are plenty of resources for keen amateurs to frame these experiences. At upmarket gyms, people know how to brief an instructor on their body’s quirks and foibles. It’s relatively normal for white-collar professionals to see a physio. The fact it is perfectly possible to have something happen to your body which just makes things worse forever isn’t something most of us will face up to unless, or until, we have to — me included. Everybody knows that when your knees go, you can always swim.
It’s true that my power numbers are now going back up. I’ve booked accommodation to cycle a solo loop around Sicily in April, and against my better judgment — and fundamentally workshy nature — I’ve registered for L’Etape du Tour in July. All being well, my legs will once again ride up a very big hill.
Yet what I’ll remember from this period is how meaningless it felt to lose strength. Sat on the sofa watching one of the writers from Everybody Love Raymond slam mezcal and wondering what I was going to do for a job, I didn’t feel like I was experiencing a setback. In fact, I didn’t feel very much at all.
(A few weeks later, I found the photo my codeine-addled brain sent to my parents to convince them I was fine. I look like Andrew WK.)
Consider a long enough time span and we are all, whatever our present circumstances, trending towards having a body that will do less (and, ultimately, nothing! What a thought!) Everything we do to improve our health is only a negotiation with entropy.
If this all sounds depressing — if you’re reading this and thinking wow, you sure did get made redundant, huh — then it needn’t be. At a time of year when the prevailing mood is all goal-setting and big plans, I find it’s quite relaxing to remember that the future is unknowable, infinite improvement is impossible, and the only way to move is responsively; a little more of the things that feel good, a little less of the things that don’t.
My only resolution in 2023, then, is to think less about training — a word which always implies a payoff deferred — and more about moving in my body. And possibly to buy some new gloves.
Some things I’ve enjoyed recently
- Not all the people who have been laid off are in as fortunate a position as I am — I don’t agree with everything Anne Helen Peterson says in this essay about how large companies manage redundancy, but found it very thoughtful on the fallout.
- Bethany Rutter’s episode of The Train Happy Podcast is brilliant, and she talks about finding pleasure in movement far better than I could. Here or wherever you get podcasts.
