Jogging in Zone 4

Until recently I was anti-exercise. I probably just wasn’t over secondary school P.E lessons, how degrading they were.

I am still anti-gym; today, on two separate buses, I heard passengers describing their cardio, how overweight they were, discipline, discipline - some of them were in school uniform. I am unsure whether our newfound obsession with the gym has come about because of the front-facing camera, or whether the front-facing camera has facilitated our obsession with the gym. It’s all just late capitalism yadda yadda eat more drink more scroll your phone more pay more lift more weights take more pics. Be more.

Going for a run in the park is moreish, too, but intrinsically. It’s addictive - one circuit becomes two becomes three becomes four. I see you, reader, with your apple watch telling you your heart rate and your distance and your PB, no, no, no, stop! Alright, maybe it works for you. What works for me, though, is leaving the house without my phone, at 9pm, no music, just the tender air, the soothing sky, the other runners (woo) and dogs (boo) and perhaps some teens on stolen lime bikes.

I put off running for so long. For years and years my mum suggested that I do it to quell the manic, racing thoughts that make my head feel so heavy all the time. In one of her substack posts Rachel Connolly shared that she was scared of not knowing how to run properly, that her knees wouldn’t be high enough - same, except I feared that my arms would move weirdly, move gay-ly, and that former school bullies would see (I don’t give a fuck about this now :)). I almost started last summer but my therapist at the time told me not to since my body was in such a state from burnout. I put it off for many weeks this year, too, since I thought it had to be done in the morning and I don’t like the morning. Whatever. Just fucking do it.

My latest intrusive thought, though, is how on earth I will keep up with running when I move to Norwich. I do the same laps around my mediocre local park; I run in the suburbs with the mums who get the Piccadilly Line into the office at 7am and the dads who bake cakes. The building I will be living in from September is slap bang in the middle of the city centre. No park for miles. Yikes.

This prospect has made me better appreciate my suburb, my suburb that I wanted to leave so badly as a 17-year old that only a 350-mile move to Glasgow constituted sufficient distance. Ealing was cringe. Ealing was every word that meant bad. Perhaps this is just a part of growing up, coming back to your childhood bedroom looking like skeletor when you’ve worked yourself to death again, Jeevan, godsake. (I am hugely privileged to still have this sanctuary, kept ticking by loving parents)

The suburbs are meant to be boring, they are where you are meant to move to raise your family once the era of fun is over and you have a stable job and a spouse and savings. (I will probably have none of these for a good while lol). They say that boredom engenders creativity; it was in boring snoring Bromley that Hanif Kureishi was born and Karim Amir thrived; in dutty grotty Hounslow Jess Bhamra learned to Bend It Like Beckham and the rudeboys in Londonstani stole phones and made buck. Zadie Smith has set nearly every book in the North-West London suburbs: Willesden (legal aid lawyers, chicken shop veterans, Pakistani owners of Irish pubs and Irie Jones the buck-toothed teenage schoolgirl); Harlesden (where Poppy Burt-Jones slept with a parent); Kilburn (where a single mum became the first Black MP).

Decades of great art set in the suburbs. Then it stopped. Smith decided she wanted to write historical fiction instead and that was that. I asked a bookseller the other day if he knew of any books set in the suburbs; he did not. I raised a good point, he said, generously. There was one out fairly recently set in Harrow but you got no sense of the local area and the writing was bad. Another, England is Mine, had bits set near Newbury Park but had as much set in Haggerston. Why, now, is every London novel stuck in Zone 2 or Zone 3, stuck next to the Overground (or Windrush Line as it is called now) and Regent’s Canal. Is it the authors, who moved to London and themselves live in such places? Perhaps. Are the people who were raised in the suburbs more recently no longer writing books? Sounds a bit more tenuous.

This was quite a bodge job of a piece but I have been thinking about the suburbs a lot in relation to my running and what I am reading and I had a coffee by mistake this afternoon so here we are. I find it so fascinating how your environment changes your brain structure, changes who you are. A friend who has just returned to her village in Cheshire is not especially pleased to be back there, she tells me over voice note. We don’t think about setting enough. Start running and do it outdoors, somewhere that’s nice.