Keep sport short (From Stroud News and Journal)

Keep sport short

SPORT, who needs it, I thought as I lay on the floor of Stratford Park Leisure Centre squash courts coughing up my lungs one evening this week.

I know, I know, smoking and sport have never gone together. Mixing exercise with addiction is neither big nor clever. So why do it?

The simple answer is vanity. I've been sitting on my swivel chair in the SNJ offices for months.

My greatest physical excursions, other than taking it for a spin, are to the kettle, the water-cooler, the chippy and the pub. I resent doing three out of four of these.

Life is a choice between moving and not moving. The latter is my preference. Or it used to be until turning 29 triggered metabolic slowdown and advancing age began to weary my hitherto inexhaustible youthful vigour.

Expanding waistline, huffing and puffing up the hills of Stroud, greeting my naked reflection with a mild sense of distaste. The omens were not good.

So I did what all good white-collar fairies of sound mind do in times of physical crisis. I took up badminton. Or, as my SNJ colleague and doubles partner Sam Bond terms it - the national sport of office workers. It is made for the fat, the old, the unfit and the uncoordinated. Just my game.

Badminton served as a gentle reintroduction to the world of exertion. A world I had turned my back on more than a decade ago after a particularly brutal encounter with an over-sized over-aged prop forward while playing for Cirencester Rugby Club. Badminton, so very akin to the ancient art of fly swatting, was much more like it.

But I made a cardinal, cardiac arresting error. I upped the exercise ante too soon, played squash and paid the price. Squash is to badminton what Mt Everest is to Rodborough Hill.

And everyone knows you shouldn't climb before you can walk. So it was that I found myself on my back, on the floor, drenched in sweat, gasping for air and wondering between coughing fits, who needs sport?