Some things I know: it’s nine steps from my bed to the toilet, forty-two steps down the stairs, fifty-five seconds at a brisk pace to the corner shop, four minutes thirty seconds to the nearest supermarket, where they stock the Morrisons Best oats (because some oats are better than others) that I’ve eaten for breakfast at 8.30 a.m. for almost twenty years. Lunch and dinner I allow myself windows, 12.00 and 12.30 and 18.30 and 19.00. I know that there are 184 calories in the 75g of uncooked oats that I weigh each morning on my food scales, that I can lose an entire kilo after thirty minutes in a hot bath, as weighed on my bathroom scales, that I need to hit a ratio of two breaths in to five breaths out during my ten minutes of meditation for my heart rate to hit the 52–55 bpm range that signals I’m calm enough to achieve 7.5 hours sleep. Why do I keep track of all this? Because I once had the best time in the world.
Correction: the country. I held the Irish national record for under-16 200m butterfly, for just under a year, until it was taken from me. But for that one year, I was the best – 2 minutes 17 seconds, that was my number. It got me all the way to the 2003 European Youth Olympics in Paris. Note the qualifiers: European, Youth. A twice watered down imitation of the real thing. We had an opening ceremony. We marched around a local football stadium outside the boulevard peripherique.. We even did what our coach, who had been to the real Olympics, told us that real Olympics athletes did at the real opening ceremony: swap our national pins with other athletes. The winner got the most pins.
Some people say swimming is soothing because you can zone out, or just be present and focus on nothing but the strokes. These people are amateurs. From ten to seventeen I devoted my whole life to swimming: two hours a day in the pool, four at weekends. I counted everything: eighteen strokes per length, twenty-eight laps remaining, three seconds ahead of my training partner.
Swimming training is interval training: ten sets of 100m at 1.30, for example. That means you’d want to do your 100m at about 1.15 to have 15 seconds rest before going again. Or should you come in at 1.20, an easier pace, but less rest? You hit the wall, you look up, see the clock: 1.16, 1.17. You know how well you are doing, or not.
1.74m, that was the number that ended it. That’s how tall I was when puberty – life’s greatest performance-enhancing hormone treatment – came to an end. The guy who took my record (obviously I still know his name) kept growing: 1.90m, 2.10m. Soon all the boys I used to race were men over two meters tall, and 2.10m will always beat 1.74m, so I was out.
I couldn’t let it go. I didn’t do any sports for years. But then I moved from Ireland to the UK, and needed new friends in a new country.
1.35: the rowing split I needed to hit on the machine, for a sustained four minute set, if I wanted to make the first boat at my third-tier Oxford college. Eight: the number of rowers in a boat. Zero: the friends I made. 3:2: the rhythm I could never master. Three counts forward, the paddle flat, skimming the surface of the river, and then two counts to flick the wrist, dip the oar, and ‘heave’ the oar back through the water. I was always out of sync. They only kept me around because I did, in fact, hit 1.35 on the machine. I was never a team player, but nobody in that third tier club could beat my numbers on the machines.
After rowing, I took up running. I needed a way to relax while trying to get a job in academia, the most brutal and competitive sport of all. Running taught me one of the pleasures of sports: unlike when applying for a job, you at least decide the standards you will be judged by. There are so many metrics you can apply to your body beyond weight, height, body fat percentage and V02max. There are so many ways to tell yourself: today was objectively better than yesterday, this year better than that one. Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.
One hour, an hour fifteen, and hour and a half: I focused on building up the time I could run, not the distance. The English countryside was boring: faux medieval meadows, mock-Tudor pubs, overhead pylons. I set a time on my phone and went fifteen minutes further each weekend, until running took up three hours on a Saturday, and stretching and bathing the entire following Sunday. Then I measured how long it took to recover, from the cramps and pains, numbers that descended, four days, three, two, until they started to ascend again, back up to three and four, and then I got a job.
Not that life’s challenges ever end, not that I can stop inventing new ones. After the pandemic, I got into cycling. I’d read you could join clubs, meet people. Instead I discovered that cycling was the most numerical sport of all, and I made friends instead with a whole new set of numbers. Speed, cadence, heart-rate, power – in watts! Every stroke tracked and synced to my phone and laptop. But then, trying to improve my numbers, I discovered RPE: Rate of Perceived Exertion. How much effort do I perceive I am putting in? How difficult do I feel this is?
I love the idea that we are all made up of a number of ‘parts’ that are secretly in conflict with one another. It allows me to say things like: A part of me thinks life just is a competition and the real cruelty is pretending otherwise. Another part thinks that’s all those years spent swimming, counting in order to compete: they’ve probably ruined me for life. But what can you do about it now, says perhaps my worst part of all. That part only asks rhetorical questions.
No, it’s probably not great to go through life thinking, deep down, that everyone is competing with everyone else. Thinking, ‘don’t be so cynical, she is just trying to do the thing she loves and – oh wait, no, look at her website, that long list of achievements, she wants you to know that she has won and you have lost’. Well, I don’t blame her. I was a winner once. I know how good it feels.
I guess I have a unique perspective. On a potential IVF journey, for example. Only a certain percentage of my sperms will ever fertilise an egg; only a certain percentage of embryos are ever any good; only a certain percentage of those will implant in the person I hope I’ll parent with. You see: turns out life itself is just a numbers game.
Jobs, therapy, kids: I’m older now, and unlike your time in race, age is a number that only goes up, and never down. But me and my parts are doing OK. These days we’ve more numbers than ever: 115kg, my current squat; 130kg, my current deadlift; 105kg, my bench press; 190g, my target protein intake; 205g, my actual protein intake last week. It’s amazing the ‘meal plans’ men can get away with by being ‘into fitness’.
I keep track of all these numbers in an Excel spreadsheet on my phone, just like everyone else I see lifting their dumbbells and running on treadmills, people I do sometimes even talk to during those long hours sitting in the gym, typing in my phone, looking at my numbers, staring in the mirror.
