This is Matt. Matt is skinning the cat. And he’s coaching me to skin the cat. I’m a long way off doing that. But, as I learnt last year, anything is possible if you want it to be. It seems he’s also coaching me to record videos – I failed to press the right button on the first two attempts. But thank me, because after a bit of whinging about not prostituting himself, he agreed to take his t-shirt off to record the third demo.
A decade ago, a fellow gym member 10 years my senior was watching me doing burpees. “I could do that when I was your age,” she told me. “Wait till you get to mine.” Fitness has always been important to me. And her words sent a jab of fear through me so powerful that I can still recreate the feeling all these years later. But now I am the age she was then. And I can still do burpees. It’s not my age that defines my limits. It’s my own thoughts and beliefs.
My mum, Margaret, didn’t consider age a limiter. At 84, she was back on the tennis court just 16 weeks after major heart surgery. At 96, a couple of weeks before she died of cancer, she was doing seated exercises. She listened to her body. But she didn’t see her age as relevant.
Last year, when I did my running challenge, it was to celebrate my 60th birthday. But being 60 didn’t define what was achievable. In fact, I ran many miles further than I’d ever run before. What that experience taught me was that I’m capable of a lot more than I think I am - as long as I put the work in.
It was Matt who set the distances for my running challenge. They were distances he believed I could do. They were way greater than the distances I believed I was capable of. At the beginning, anyway. Four months in, with the weekly mileage having almost doubled, I began to believe that it was possible. By the time I came to do my challenge (a year after I started training), I believed it was more or less a done deal. That change happened because the mileage rose so gradually that I always believed I could do what was being asked of me that particular week. And that was all I needed to focus on.
Anyway, to get back to skinning the cat. A lot of my training is about running. And running has been central to almost every significant goal I’ve set myself physically over the last 40 years. But having seen a very athletic and strong (and young) man gracefully execute this move in the gym a few months back, I felt drawn to a different kind of challenge. A challenge for which you need very strong shoulders, extraordinarily powerful lats, abs of steel and a grip of iron. I didn’t have any of those things.
So back in January, I bought a chin-ups bar. To begin with, I could hang off it for 20 seconds. Then 30, 40, 50… a minute. I progressed to putting my foot in a big fat orange band, which supported a lot of my weight. And pulling myself up. Then it was the grey band, which gave me less support. Then the green - a little thin band that doesn’t help very much at all.
Training is like that. Some seemingly impossible goal. Then day after day, you turn up. Do a bit more. Take tiny steps forward. So small, that you hardly feel like you are progressing at all. But you are. There are times when progress seems to stall. But you keep going. And in the end, miracles happen.
Yesterday was my first training session in the gym since I set myself this goal. The first time I’ve had rings to practice on. Matt demonstrated the whole move while I watched (thinking to myself “Oh god, why did I sign up for this?”). Then he broke it down into sections. Then it was my turn. The aim was to push off and get my knees into the first position he’d demonstrated. I wasn’t successful. So he got a block for me to stand on. I fared better. But froze when I got to tipping backwards. To overcome this fear he got me to hang ape-like on a horizontal bar. Then, crawl sloth-like along it, upside down, hands and feet gripping the bar.
So, week one is done. And there many more to come, I suspect, before I put up a video of me skinning the cat. But skin the cat, I will.