I used to laugh at the lockdown runners – until I got weighed

With a second wave approaching, Jenny Eclair is in the market for some fancy sports gear

Running became popular when Britons were limited to one form of outdoor exercise a day (Getty)

I have had a difficult relationship with joggers ever since the pandemic forced the exercise freaks out of the gym and on to our streets. I disliked the way they swarmed through the parks approaching from behind, panting like asthmatic pugs, sweat flying.  

I coined the acronym NAR, which stood for “not a runner”, to describe those who were obviously struggling and didn’t look built for the task – big-breasted women and men with rickety ankles, cracking audibly with every step. I secretly laughed at people who were determinedly jogging, despite not being equipped in any way whatsoever, and this included “ladies of a certain age” who were having a go despite refusing to leave their handbags at home, hahaha.

And then I got weighed. I didn’t want to get weighed, I was doing some filming for a TV travel show in Wales and one of the activities involved specialist equipment that necessitated standing on some scales, so I didn’t have any choice. They wouldn’t even let me take all my clothes off, I was weighed in my boots, great big heavy boots and my hugely heavy shirt and massively weighty dungarees, yeah, dungarees, OK?

“Please don’t tell me,” I bleated, shutting my eyes as they wrote a number with a black sharpie on what looked like a scarily medical wristband. I tried to shove the evidence up my shirt sleeve. I was about to experience one of those activities that other people put on their bucket list. I don’t have a bucket list. If I did, the only thing I’d put on it is “buy a new bucket” because the phrase annoys me. In any case, doing this daredevil activity wasn’t my idea, it was the telly people’s idea. I was just being a good sport, spurred on by the fact I wasn’t paying for it.  

Sadly I can’t tell you what the activity was because the series is still under wraps, but suffice to say it involved a massive height and a silly amount of speed. It was one of those experiences to treasure and I did, sort of. Only just as I was about to embark on the adventure, I accidentally caught sight of the number on my wristband. My weight was written in kilos. Now, I’m a pounds and ounces girl so it didn’t immediately compute.

Unfortunately, once I’d seen the number I couldn’t forget it and I spent the entire duration of my “once in a lifetime experience” working out how much I actually weighed. No wonder I was pale when it was all over. I’d done the sums and the result was shocking. At 5ft 4in, I had weighed in at almost 12 stone, which would probably be fine if I was a boxer, but I’m not.

Of course I blame corona. Corona is the reason for my afternoon raids on the cheese tupperware and that extra cheeky glass of chardonnay, every goddam night. Corona is also the reason why my stage cavorting has ground to a halt and as a consequence I am around 20 pounds heavier than I was in February.

To be honest, I’d had my suspicions. There were an increasing number of items in my wardrobe that I either couldn’t get my arms into or couldn’t quite do up, but I’d literally just pushed them to one side. Then there had been the trip up north with my sister and daughter when my pants in comparison with theirs had looked like a parachute on the bathroom floor and then there was the breathlessness, ho-hum.  

I’d backed myself into a corner and, with the second wave of corona approaching, I knew I had to do something, so I downloaded the dreaded Couch to 5k app. For those who genuinely have never heard of this, it’s an NHS approved running app for absolute beginners, designed to do what it says on the tin. Once you’ve downloaded it to your phone, it provides you with a nine-week step-by-step guide to eventually running five kilometres in one go.

With two, 20-minute “walk/runs” currently under my belt, this seems a very distant dream, though having completed my trots with a neoprene wrist brace acting as an improvised phone holder, a tiny leather handbag for my house keys round my neck and a pair of 10-year-old trainers on my feet, I’m already looking at “professional running kit” online.

At this stage in the game, there are two ways this is going to go, I’m either going to spend 300 quid buying fancy sports gear on the internet and never jog again or I’m going to continue dry heaving over the neighbour’s walls and limping gamely round the block.

So far the closest I’ve come to quitting was when I heard my trainer Laura utter the word “gotten” alongside the equally heinous “you’re doing good”, but if I can swallow that and manage to complete the course, then don’t expect me to ever stop banging on about it, because only then will I be a true jogger.