At
school I was OK at maths and English, so it didn’t bother me much
that I turned into a prototype
dodo during PE. My parents, friends and especially netball team-mates
totally accepted that I just wasn’t a sporty type. Chief among the
unbagsied, I was usually inflicted upon whichever team complained
least loudly, and my impotent flailing confined to the back of the
gym/pitch/court.
The good
news about a confession of this
type is that I can feel through the ether the many of you who are
nodding and empathising. I don’t know if there are published goals
for games lessons in school – you know, enjoyment of sport, desire
to participate even without the threat of detention - but to judge by
the Health Survey for England (cited here, p 31) they
don’t work. Using a device called an accelerometer to measure
physical activity the survey found that a miserable 6% of men and 4%
of women achieve the government’s recommended weekly physical
activity level. As a nation, we are melding with our office chairs
and sofas. Evolution will soon provide us with stain-resistant
upholstery.
The good
news for me is that I was very, very lucky. My brother started Judo
and I fancied giving it a go. I sat my O-level mocks with matching
black-eyes from my first grading, and the real exams with a repeat
pair from Aikido, taken up at a similar time. I was clearly enjoying
myself too much to care that I looked like a racoon. Weight training
to help with strength followed and, eventually, took over. I even
spent a year being a health-instructor until I realised that the
tedium of being asked how to make bums smaller was going to lead to
madness or violence. At the age of twenty-seven I learned to swim,
and now I run.
I must
add that I do all of these things very badly
indeed. Except the Aikido … I was alright at that. But everything
else was, and is, done despite the miserable lack of attainment. I
have learned to like exercise for its own sake: in other words,
exactly the opposite way it was taught at school.
A quick
breeze over a report from the University of East London
(p56) about
the expected legacy outcomes of London
2012 considers the Olympic Games’ effects in terms of employment,
skills tourism, house prices and so on. And it also addresses what
is, in my opinion, an oft-repeated canard – that the sight of
sporting excellence may precipitate a nation to undock from its soft
furnishings and head out to the nearest playing field. It says:
“The Olympic Charter aims to encourage and support the development of sport for all … There is an intention towards a virtuous circuit: sport for all feeds elite sport which, in turn, it is hoped, will inspire more people to participate. Trickle down and knock on effects are assumed with the affective charge of the Games, the role models of the athletes, the infrastructure and expertise mobilised in putting the Games on and extensive global broadcasting of Olympic sport all key ingredients in the process.”
So –
plenty of good intentions. But
the report’s conclusions are refreshingly unhyperbolous when it
considers the real evidence: “
.. there has been a paucity
of studies on post-Games participation in sport and whether an
Olympic Games provides a short
or longer term bounce for community participation in sport”. Where
changes have been perceived in the past: “… the Olympic Games are
likely to have been one factor amongst many …”
All
of which makes me ponder on a strand of thought that unites both
school games and the Olympics – the assumption that greatness and
achievement motivate spectators to participate.
I think
it probably does exactly the opposite.
There’s
an apocryphal anecdote that George
W. Bush was appalled that fifty percent of Americans were below
average intelligence. The use of the tale is not to prove that Dubbya
is as thick as the most afflicted of his countrymen – he probably
didn’t say it – but it does encapsulate that sad truth that in
order for some to excel, others can’t. In the case of elite sport,
that’s most of us.
Yet
we’re left with a durable bit of cultural software from nineteenth
century public schools that runs in a seemingly uninterruptible
loop: sport, pain, humiliation, virtue, sport, pain …
The
psychology of motivation has been studied a great deal in the era
between the brutality of Eton’s height-of-empire playing fields and
our present obesity epidemic. I’m personally very fond of Stanford
psychologist Carol Dweck’s work on praise and motivation in which
she encourages parents and
teachers to give accolades for process rather than outcome. Dweck’s
experiments suggested that those praised for their intelligence
seemed to regard it as a fixed quality and to be more conservative in
their future choices; in trying to retaining their ‘clever’
status, they did things that made them look clever all the time,
sometimes missing out on trying harder tasks, disappointments,
reversals and the opportunity for problem-solving that those things
all bring. It seems that if you can instead get hooked on ‘process’
(and thereby tenacity), a decent level of attainment will follow
anyway. It’s hard to focus on something over a long period of time
and remain too bad at it.
In fact,
when you get into process, you stand a chance of experiencing one of
the most pleasurable things known to man that doesn’t involve
chocolate – a condition
labelled by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as ‘flow’.
Flow
occurs when you are completely absorbed in a task: you can lose time
and even your sense of self. It’s been called other things too,
such as ‘in the zone’, and we were
certainly aware of the notion in martial arts.
Flow
didn’t really figure in our
incongruously-named athletics sessions at school, during which we
were each timed or measured performing explosive and aspirational
feats for which there had been absolutely no preparation. As wilted
and asthmatic teenagers collapsed with burning lungs and pulled
hamstrings, the crimplene-tracksuited gym-teacher assiduously filled
out the Amateur Athletics Association paperwork. It was only later,
when I did my stint assisting others in gyms, that I wondered how
many of my clients would have expired on the spot if I did the same
thing with them.
But the
data were there – the results.
We hadn’t learned to enjoy, but we had been successfully measured.
That
danger of applying labels, with the attendant tendency to indelibly
mark, has been usefully explored in other contexts too. Everyone who
has explored cognitive-behavioural therapy for depression has
encountered the idea that “depressed right now” is a description,
and “depressed” or “depressive” are potentially
self-fulfilling prophecies. I know that I didn’t regard myself as
“bad at netball this session”, but as “inept at any kind of
physical activity whatsoever”.
My Judo
club ran three squash courts too, so the squashies and the judos
often met in the bar area. My PE teacher and I encountered each other
one evening, mutually alarmed. “How amazing to see you here” she
said to me. “I never had you down as a physical type”.
So the
jock/nerd dichotomy wasn’t just me then.
If I’d
had the speed or the wit, perhaps I’d have responded to her cheek
by pointing out that disliking standing in the drizzle in very little
more than your underwear while having a wet netball smack you in the
face probably isn’t all that bizarre.
It
strikes me that there are many dimensions to being active.
Some people get excited by distance, some by time, some by scores.
Some people like to be in teams of one and some like larger groups.
If you’re not competitive, that’s fine. I used to volley on
squash courts for hours with a friend. No scoring. Load of fun.
Indications
are that key public bodies already know that the Olympic Games aren’t
going to improve gross-national-fitness by itself. This report from NHS London says: “This research shows that just having the 2012
Games in London will not automatically create a health legacy. So NHS
London is launching … the ‘Go London’ programme to realise our
ambition of improving health through increasing levels of physical
activity.”
Judo was
my very short-lived gateway drug which enabled me to overcome the
twice-weekly exercise aversion sessions at school.
I was very fortunate.
Danny
Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony was stunning. And this week I’ll
watch the gymnastics because I find it amazing and beautiful. Perhaps
there are elements of the games you’ll be drawn to watch too.
But we
shouldn’t believe any of the hogwash about the Olympics enciting us
to become athletes. The simple human pleasure of enjoying and being
in control of your body is far too important to be left to peddlers
of mirages.
