My dad couldn’t fathom why I wanted to expend precious energy on exercise

A few weeks ago I went back to the house where I grew up in the northeast of England. It was the first time I had seen the inside of it in 30 years. My childhood bedroom, where I once pinned up posters of my sporting heroes, cut from comics, had been transformed into a smart office with a laptop and printer. There was a shiny bathroom in what had been our “box room” for storing odds and ends. Much of where I lived with my dad, mum and two older sisters, still looked familiar.

It was outside, at the end of the yard and up four stone steps, where I got the biggest surprise. The garden where, once upon a time, six or eight little boys chased a ball, seemed to have shrunk. Our sporting theatre of dreams was now well kept and tidy, but it also felt far smaller than in my golden memories.

Back in the late 1970s, a regular gang would gather here for a chaotic game. We wore patches of mud between the two home-made goals at each end of the lawn, and if the ball went over the hedge then our neighbour would keep it. There were rose bushes at one side into which a young player would occasionally fall. Arguments broke out about goals or fouls, someone would go home in a huff, and we only dispersed when it got dark. It was soccer in winter, spring and autumn, and cricket in summer. Sometimes, on light evenings, my dad would take a break from tending the vegetables and briefly join in if the numbers were uneven.

On Sunday afternoons, aged about 10, I would hand him my beloved Timex watch at our front door and ask him to time me as I ran laps of the broad market square which our house overlooked. I arrived back at the doorstep, gasping, a few minutes later, desperate to know how I had done.

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Dad, then in his mid-sixties, could simply not understand my desire to exercise for the sake of it, to push myself to a physical limit. As I caught my breath, he would shake his head and ask: “Why do you want to go busting yourself?”

Even then, I realised there was an unbridgeable gulf between how we both viewed exercise. Dad kept fit through his work, and for work; I did it through choice, in contrived or organised ways, and for fun.

He worked on the land in North Yorkshire most of his life, leaving school at 12 for jobs on local farms and, later, as a gardener at an old people’s home. Early on, he ploughed the rich soil with horses. It was tough, physical toil, whatever the weather.

While some of his contemporaries got to join teams at local sports clubs on Saturdays, Dad was usually working. He enjoyed sport and, decades later, we watched endless hours together on television and went to matches, but he had little chance to play it, apart from occasionally joining us in the garden.

Dad was a gentle, quiet man, with a dry wit. Small in stature, his work made him lean, and he had strong arms and shoulders. Only when he retired, aged 65, did he put on enough weight to loosen his belt a notch, to our teasing. When he was not working, or going to church on Sundays, he conserved his energy for hard, daily labour. I remember him coming home from work exhausted, and resting in front of the fire with his feet against the hearth.

So, when he had a son late in his life, he could not fathom why I wanted to expend precious energy on exercise, and why I chose to sprint around the neighbourhood to arrive back on our doorstep panting. For him, keeping fit and strong was never a leisure pursuit; it was a necessity.

In his later years, Dad used to come and watch my school soccer matches, standing loyally on the touchline alongside my mum. We would go and watch our local team, Middlesbrough, when Jack Charlton was the club’s manager. I used to wonder if he wished he had the chances I enjoyed, to take part in organised sports and join a local team.

Fast forward four more decades, and I now get to provide unwanted advice on modern exercise regimes and fitness to my three sons, who are 20, 18 and 15 years old. They all started playing soccer in Ireland before we moved back to England 11 years ago. Their first sports clubs were in Sandymount, Dublin, and they used to watch me head off for long runs along the Strand, out to the Nature Reserve and East Wall.

The middle boy, Irish-born and now aged 18, and soon heading for university, loves going to the gym with his friends. His protein powders stand beside the breakfast cereals in the kitchen. The gym is a social as well as a physical draw. I pay the direct debit for his membership – for now - while also imploring him to go for a run or a cycle and “to get some fresh air” as an alternative to lifting weights. “Yes, Dad,” he says, before heading off to meet his mates.

The huge societal shift in attitudes to exercise and fitness came somewhere between my dad’s middle age, when he laboured outdoors, and my own, mainly spent in front of a screen. While he never stopped moving, my working days can be static and sedentary. Unlike him, I have the spare hours and the funds with which to plan my leisure and exercise, and then to go out and do it.

I now wonder how my sons, and their generation, will approach physical exercise in the future. Technology will help shape how they choose to keep fit wherever they want and at any time, with immersive offerings and apps providing more on-demand services, with virtual trainers to encourage them from anywhere in the world.

Might spiralling living costs mean that public gyms see their membership numbers fall in the next few years? Perhaps Covid and its lockdowns have embedded the value of local exercise, as we have walked, jogged and cycled around our neighbourhoods more than ever, sometimes from a lack of legal alternatives, and the simple desire to get out of the house. We have rediscovered the pleasures of free and local ways to keep fit, and learned how to join virtual offerings from home. Cycling around South Dublin last weekend I was struck by how many small groups of 20-somethings were out for a run.

I still run too when I can, not quite “busting myself”, although my first half-marathon, now looming, might do just that. I often think of my dad – who died in 1990, when I was 21 and he was 78 – as I arrive back at the house, out of breath.