Month: January 2007

No pain no gain (and no point)
Jeremy Clarkson

On the surface the human being appears to be a flawed design. Obviously our brains are magnificent and our thumbs enable us to use spanners. Something an elephant, for instance, cannot do.

However, there seems to be something wrong with our stomachs. It doesnt matter how many pints of refreshing beer we cram into them, they always want just one more roast potato. And then, instead of ejecting all the excess fat, they feed it to our hearts and veins, and we end up all dead.

Of course, we can use willpower to counter these demands, but this makes us dull and pointless. You need only look at the number of people in lonely hearts columns who neither drink nor smoke to know Im right. If they did, theyd have a husband. Its that simple.

What I tend to do when it comes to the business of being fit is not bother. I eat lots, and then I sit in a chair. The upside to this is that I have a happy family and many friends. The downside is that I wobble and wheeze extensively while going to the fridge for another chicken drumstick.

Unfortunately, all this now has to stop because in April Im going on an expedition. I cant tell you where because its a secret but I can tell you that its full of many perils, such as being eaten. And that if it all goes wrong, I may have to walk many miles over the most difficult terrain you can imagine.

Last week then, I was sent to a training camp, where the instructor, a former Royal Marine, simply could not fathom what unholy cocktail of lard and uselessness lay beneath my skin. The upshot was simple. Unless I did something dramatic about my general level of fitness, I would not be going. So I bought a rowing machine.

It cost a very great deal of money and is bigger than a small van. Modelled, I presume, on something from the KGBs cellars, you tie your feet to a couple of pedals and then move backwards and forwards until your shoulders are screaming so loudly that they are actually audible.

According to the digital readout powered by my exertions, I might add I had covered 35 yards. This was well short of the four kilometres Id planned, so I had to grit my teeth and plough on.

Eventually, after several hours, Id made enough electricity to power Glasgow and Id reached my goal, so I tried to dismount. But it was no good. My magnificent brain was so stunned by what had just happened that it had lost control of my legs. I also felt dizzy and sick. Fondly, I also imagined that I had a tingling in my left arm and chest pains.

Part of the problem is that to go on my expedition, I must be six pounds overweight. This means losing a stone so I have been living on a diet of carrots and Coke Zero, which simply doesnt provide enough calories to rock back and forth in my conservatory for half a day.

Actually, conservatory is the wrong word. I had produced so much sweat while moving about that, technically, it was a swimming pool.

Now, one of the things I should explain at this point is that I am always hugely enthusiastic about new projects, but only for a very short time. If I was to get fit and thin, it needed to be done fast, before I lost interest, so once some feeling had returned to my legs, I went for a walk. And since then time has passed in a muddy blur of cycling, trudging, rowing and discovering that its uphill to my local town, and uphill on the way back as well.

This has made me dull, thick and, because theres no beer or wine in my system at night, an even bigger insomniac. And all the while I have this sneaking suspicion that what Im doing is biologically unhealthy.

Pain is designed to tell the body something is wrong and that youd better do something fast to make it go away. So why would you get on a rowing machine and attempt to beat what God himself has put there as a warning? Thats like refusing to slow down when an overhead gantry on the motorway says Fog.

Today, then, my magnificent brain is questioning the whole philosophy of a fitness regime. If God had meant us to have a six-pack, why did He give us the six-pack? In the olden days, people had to run about to catch deer so they all had boy-band torsos and good teeth.

But now, we Darwin to work in a car. Trying to look like a 12th century African is as silly as a seal trying to regrow its legs.

No really. The thing about evolution is that each step along the way has a point. Cows developed udders so they could be plugged into milking machines. And humans developed the remote control television so they could spend more time sitting down.

Fitness fanatics should take a lead from nature. Nobody looks at water and suggests it would be more healthy if it spent 20 minutes a day trying to flow uphill and nobody suggests a lion could catch more wildebeest if it spent less of its day lounging around.

Plainly, then, our stomachs are designed to demand food and feed fat to our arteries for a reason. I dont know what the reason might be but I suspect it may have something to do with global warming. Everything else does.