Jumbo to Jockey: Fasting to the Finishing Post

So much for the innards, but what of the body that I had to shed five stone from and needed to tone into coarse muscle and sharpened reflexes? In the modern era there are so many options for fat people to lose weight. There’s a gym on every corner and swimming pools in every town. There are tennis courts and football pitches, bicycles, footpaths and now even government initiatives. When I put on my trainers for the first time, along with everyone else who was trying to make good their New Year’s resolution, I joined the crowd at our local park as we did circuits panting, wheezing and sweating like old pigs ready for slaughter. I was grateful to be told by the racing professionals that I needed to protect my knees in order hold my balance in the saddle; it meant that running was out of the question. After my brief humiliation, I started cycling instead and quickly realized that it was the perfect way to combine exercising Billy.

Billy is a golden cocker spaniel. He was a gift from my mother-in-law and soon became a secret weapon in my fight against the flab. I had never wanted a dog, relenting only to please the children, but in time he became my best mate and a source of inspiration. He was an untrained, unkempt animal with awful, slothful manners. He was greedy, hardly house-trained, could be grumpy and misbehaved at every opportunity. We had much in common. As the weeks became months and I applied the discipline, slowly he came right.

Every morning I took Billy on the lead, towing him behind me while Lara, my daughter, rode her own bike. We soon got into the routine of cycling the three miles to Lara’s school, although the first time we did this we were both nervous that Billy was going to end up under the wheels either of the bike or of a car, bus or lorry. But he got used to it and soon enough he was running alongside us, as we pedalled merrily past the morning commuters.

The weather throughout most of that winter was cold and crisp. I wore a beautiful brown tweed coat from Cordings of Piccadilly, more at home at a local point-to-point than Chelsea. Wrapped up in a puffa jacket and scarf, Lara would get dreadfully embarrassed because most parents either drove their children to school or sent nannies to escort them. After a few weeks, though, in a funny way she came round to enjoying the eccentricity of it all. Billy, on the other hand, loved it from day one. Cycling down long, tree-lined carriageways, over Chelsea Bridge, we’d stop to cross the main roads, waiting for articulated lorries to pass in a blast of diesel fumes. We took these opportunities to train Billy to sit and wait and for the lights to change before we get back on our bikes again. On the final leg of the journey we turned down Ebury Street and skirted Belgravia with people waving at us, cheering us as we arrived at the school gates. I would then chain Lara’s bike to the railings outside the school until repeating the exercise later on in the day at 3.45, when I’d go to collect her.

From school I might go to the bank, Billy still in tow, or the butcher’s, before returning home to stew some more lentils. Each time I cycled back on my own through the park I would pretend that it was a horse beneath me and not a bicycle and I would pedal furiously, overtaking Billy as he barked at me, feeling the wind in my face and knowing that every day I did this my thigh muscles would get stronger.

Working from home with Rose meant that we would meet for coffee after the school cycle ride and lunch together at 1 p.m. when we would routinely assess my diet and the exercise I was going to do. We quickly realized that the cycling alone was not enough, and so, twice a week, from the beginning of February, I took myself off to the Chelsea swimming baths just off the King’s Road and put myself through twenty lengths of really hard physical swimming, resisting the urge to resort to doggy paddle rather than the really good heart-pumping stuff of front crawl and breaststroke.

One of the many benefits of the new regime is that I found mundane weekly chores much more enticing. Going off to the shops became a welcome distraction much more easily accomplished on a bicycle than in a car. As a result, as the new regime took hold I constantly found excuses to leave the house to go for a ride on my bike. I worked out that the long driveway running west to east in Battersea Park was roughly a mile long, so each time I left the house, no matter where I was going, I would always put in a lap of the track before returning home. I would step high on the pedals and start to push, pump and tug the handlebars as if they were reins. I would try to get the bike to go flat out and kept imagining, as on those journeys back from school, that below me was not tubular steel but a real, live, galloping beast of a horse, even though I had no idea when I would be getting anyway near one.

It was only a few weeks before I was sleeping more deeply, exhausted, but exhilarated, by the exercise. From about the second week of the diet I would wake every morning quite literally feeling things – toxins, perhaps – being expunged from my body. Although I already felt leaner – even if the scales did not say as much at that stage – almost the day I started the diet spots began to appear on my face as though twenty years of three-hour lunches and fine wine was seeping out of my body. It was as though my body was celebrating the change, enjoying the respite I was affording it and was preparing itself for the transformation that I was undergoing. Very soon after I started the regime, I ceased to have the urge to eat as I once had done, to drink or to smoke. It was as though the passion I had for all these pleasures had been transferred in one fell swoop to indulging none of them as I set about straightening myself out and getting fit.

By the end of the first month I had given up smoking altogether. Even at Christmas, I had been devouring thirty cigarettes a day with religious devotion even though I was not starting until after three in the afternoon. Like any good addict, I had quit on numerous occasions in the past and found it easy, but this time it would be different, I promised myself. This time I would quit for good, another positive side-effect of going in pursuit of this dream. The only problem, I knew, was that when I stopped smoking I would have to look for some other distraction. If I could channel that dedication into another kind of obsession, then I would easily be fit for a race day in September.

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