#COUCHPOTATO RENAMER NOT RUNNING FULL#

“You look like a burglar,” offered my wife. I cobbled together an outfit from what I had: an old sweatshirt, jogging bottoms, a woolly hat with a Nike swoosh that I had no recollection of buying. I got a couch to 5K app for my phone – a stern American lady telling you when to walk and when to run over the music of your choice.

#COUCHPOTATO RENAMER NOT RUNNING FULL#

So I took up running, largely because it required virtually no financial outlay on my part: if, as seemed likely, I packed it in after four attempts, at least I wouldn’t be left with a direct debit to cancel or a spare room full of kit in mint condition save for the inch of dust. Increasingly, my youngest daughter’s drawings of me – pea-sized head balanced on enormous circular body, lines for limbs – looked less like a four year old trying to grapple with concepts of space and representation in the pre-schematic stage of development than a photorealist portrait. My arms and legs were still incredibly skinny. It wouldn’t have mattered had it been evenly distributed but it all went on my stomach. I’d been incredibly skinny my whole life, then I hit my 40s and put on the best part of three stone. One minute I seemed to be happily careering through life, Marlboro Menthol in one hand, gin and tonic in the other, treating anyone who took exercise with the total disdain they evidently deserved the next thing I knew, I’d turned into a walking library of quiet neuroses about everything: how much I smoked, how much I drank, what I weighed. I can’t really pinpoint what started me off worrying about my health. Alexis Petridis: ‘I haven’t radically overhauled the rest of my lifestyle.’ Photograph: Andrew Hasson

Couchpotato renamer not running