What I remember is not how I looked. It is how little I had to negotiate with my body.
I could run without my breath giving out. I could lift. I could fold into shapes I had assumed were meant for other people. Whatever a day asked of me, my first thought wasn’t about what I couldn’t do.
That isn’t where I began.
I was an overweight kid who played sport. The two sit together more comfortably than people expect. I turned up, I joined in, I enjoyed it — and I still went home in a body that didn’t quite feel like it belonged to the game I’d just played. Being active and being fit turned out to be different things.
Then I started training with my mentor, who taught children and young people in the evenings, for nothing.
At the time, the free part barely registered. I was there to train. It took years — and a working life, and a diary of my own — before I understood what it costs an adult to give away their evenings.
Football, boxing, and the movements in between
He taught football and boxing. Between the two there was always the other work: the movement, the holds, the long stretches that asked something different of us than a game did.
Years later I learned that much of what we practised were hatha yoga asanas. I didn’t recognise it as yoga then. They were simply what we did before and after.
Then, slowly, the change. Running got easier. Lifting got easier. Stretches that had been out of reach stopped being out of reach, and that changed how willing I was to attempt the next one.
There was satisfaction in looking healthier, of course. But the better pleasure was finding out what my body could do, and then finding out again the following week. Effort stopped being the price of training and became the point of it.
Mornings and evenings. It took a great deal of my time, and I gave it gladly. It was the fittest I have ever been.
The evening feeling
One thing has stayed with me more than any of it: how I felt after yoga at the end of a day.
I would arrive tired. I would leave without the tiredness. Then I’d sleep deeply and wake refreshed.
I was training constantly in those years, moving all the time, living a life with fewer claims on it. I can’t pull those threads apart now and tell you which one did what. But I know how it felt to live in that body, and I have never quite stopped comparing.
When the shape of a life changes
Then: marriage. Work. Living in another country. Children.
Nothing dramatic happened to the routine. It was simply outbid, day after day, by things that mattered more at the time. The hour didn’t vanish. It got spent elsewhere.
There were intentions, and there were starts. Nothing that lasted.
Here is the part that’s hard to say out loud: I knew exactly how good that practice had made me feel, and I still couldn’t begin again. Remembering a benefit is not the same as making room for it.
Other things slid alongside it. Convenience took over the cooking. Looking after myself stopped being a decision and became whatever was left over. The gap between the man I remembered being and the one I actually was got quietly wider.
I missed being fit. More than that, I missed the feeling of giving something back to myself.
Starting from the body I have
My children are older now. A little room has opened.
So I’m returning to yoga. I’m walking more. I’d like sport back in my life. And I’m paying proper attention to food — cooking vegetarian, working out how to make it balanced, filling and realistic for a family on a weeknight.
What I can’t do is lift the old routine and drop it into this life. Trying to recreate that routine has been difficult. Mornings and evenings belonged to a different chapter. This return has to be built for the one I’m in: busy, interrupted, some days a write-off.
The starting point isn’t the body I had. It’s this one, and the time I can actually give it.
Something worth handing on
Being a parent has changed why any of this matters.
I want my children to have chances to move, to try sports, to discover what they’re capable of. I want good food to be something they enjoy rather than something they’re lectured about. I’d like looking after yourself to feel ordinary to them — a habit, not another demand on the list.
And in time, I’d like to help open those doors for other young people too.
Which brings me back to him. He had no way of knowing how far those evenings would travel. The training ended, I grew up, I moved away, years passed. What survived was smaller and more durable than anything technical he taught me: the memory of feeling capable, and an understanding of what an adult’s time can do for a young person who hasn’t yet worked out what they’re made of.
There’s no transformation to report. I’m at the beginning of this.
But there is movement again, and intention, and something ahead worth walking towards.
And perhaps, later on, a few evenings of my own to give away.