Jogging with Jo Whiley
Not quite the running man
Some time ago, I was kindly given a copy of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami.
In the book, Murakami, an acclaimed and celebrated writer who has also completed multiple marathons and long-distance events, reflects at some length on the relationship between running and creativity.
What I, Ben Richards, talk about when I talk about running follows below, and apparently includes, among other things, Dominic Raab and The Pigeon Detectives.
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Jo Whiley is talking to me through my headphones.
‘Welcome to the final run of the Couch to 5K programme. You’ve made it! Huge congratulations on coming all this way.’
It sounds like a great achievement, but the words sound rather hollow these days, seeing as I first heard them, and completed the programme, back in 2022.
I can’t quite work out whether the current thinking among lifestyle gurus is that people should try to iron out their foibles as much as possible as part of an ongoing journey of self-improvement, or whether they should stand their ground and set boundaries regarding others’ expectations of them.1 But, for what it’s worth, I’ve tried to be less awkward and uptight with age, and found it to be a broadly positive move.
In some respects, though, I do like routine. I was perturbed some years ago by the revelation that former Conservative minister Dominic Raab had the same Pret A Manger baguette for lunch every day, and the subsequent speculation as to what this said about him as a person2 – as well as his diet – because it’s a state of affairs which I would find entirely satisfactory.
I like food. I’m not a person who always orders the same dishes from a takeaway or in a restaurant. At home, I cook and eat a variety of different things, and like to try out new recipes where possible.
But when it comes to lunch at work, I can’t get too excited. In fact, I’d rather not make a decision at all. Just go to the same place, and get the same thing. Not every day for the rest of my life, but for a few months at least, then change it up – I think that’s fine.
For similar reasons, I continue to use the Couch to 5K app long after completing the programme. I know there must be other apps, but, frankly, I can’t really be arsed to look. I can barely be arsed to go for a run in the first place, but I’m a middle-aged man who plays no other sport and does no other exercise – no donning lycra and cycling over hills or golfing holidays with ‘the lads’3 for me – and so running it is.
The Couch to 5K app did really help me, back when I started, and the programme clearly works. Set it going, and your chosen trainer will tell you what to do and when to do it, interrupting your music or podcast briefly to issue instructions and/or small soundbites of motivation. I haven’t checked who you can choose from these days, but as it’s a BBC app, I imagine the current roster includes Jay Blades, someone from Strictly and one of the new Gladiators.
I picked the Radio 2 DJ and presenter Jo Whiley, whose implausibly long stint at Radio 1 stretched from the 90s into 00s, just as my teens stretched into my twenties, in a way that allowed me to think that time was passing much more slowly than it was. As long as Jo Whiley was still on Radio 1, then I was still young enough to listen to Radio 1.
‘Ready to start your final run?’
This isn’t what Jo means, but technically every run could be my last – possibly ever. Eschewing anything other than the bare minimum of warm-ups (I basically just do a couple that I remember, plus another that a personal trainer told me about once after I pulled a muscle), each begins with a series of sensations that conjure images of that bit in Terminator 2 where the T-1000 gets frozen in liquid nitrogen and tries to keep moving.
I always follow the same route, even though I am lucky enough to live in an area that boasts a wide variety of beautiful scenery to explore. Again: I like routine, and I know I’m at least guaranteed a good view of the hills and fields in the second half of this run, which helps keep me going. Plus, it stays close to where people are, or will be, throughout: if the worst were to happen, someone would at least be able to offer assistance (or discover my body) before too long.
Introducing this final run, Jo says at one point, with a chuckle, ‘No surprises anymore!’
And for me, there are literally none: I know, for example, that the first of her prompts will come as I run past a speed warning sign and childishly hope that a car will exceed the 20mph limit at the same time, just so I can pretend that my super-fast running has triggered it.
The major milestones of the 30-minute run — 5 minutes, 10 minutes, halfway, etc. — all earn you a significant piece of encouragement. In between, there are shorter, more generic, clips.
‘Keep pushing, you’re doing brilliantly!’ says Jo. She is perfect for this task, although having never tried out Blades, Strictly and Gladiator (or whoever), I obviously have no basis for comparison.
During her heyday as a mellow mainstream presence on Radio 1, having departed the edgier Evening Session in 1997, Whiley maintained a balance between enthusiasm and cool which always left you unsure as to whether she had genuinely liked the record she’d just played, or indeed the cover of Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend performed by The Pigeon Detectives in the Live Lounge.4
I have no reason to question the sincerity of her intentions when recording these Couch to 5K clips, and I doubt she or anyone else thought that one person might listen to the same set over 100 times.
Having done so, though, the repetition has done little to erode the performance. Each time, I genuinely feel like part of a promising indie band being thanked for coming into the studio to deliver an acoustic version of one of our songs, without ever knowing if we’ll be invited back.
The enthusiasm ramps up towards the end of the run – this is supposed to be the culmination of 9 weeks’ hard work, after all. Any sense of achievement has long ceased to be part of this endeavour, but I usually catch a glimpse of myself in the window of a parked car just as Jo is telling me how close I am to reaching the end.
I’ve largely stopped doing that thing where I flinch at my own reflection, or a bad photo, or upon hearing a recording of my own voice, mainly because, like it or not, that is probably how I look and sound, all the time, and I simply can’t add worrying about that to my list of things to worry about.
However, what I see here reveals that I am not moving anywhere near as fast as it feels I am moving. In fact, my feet are so close to the ground at this point that a still image of the scene would arguably not show a man running, but a man standing: a static, sweaty, baffled mess.
By now I will have decided whether to conduct my final warm-down walk in the direction of the shop in order to reward myself with a protein bar (which is probably bad for you) and a Lucozade (which definitely is).
It’s nice to have a Lucozade and feel you deserve it, and not just because you have a hangover – the latter being an outcome that, unlike exercise, becomes easier to achieve with age. Whether it actually provides any benefit other than tasting nice, I’m not sure, but those famous adverts from the 80s and 90s worked on me back then and I’m not about to start looking into it now.
As I approach the house, Jo is celebrating on my behalf, telling me how proud she is and talking about wanting to see graduation badges and photos. I’m not really sure what she means – I haven’t read anything else about the programme, or explored any of the app’s features apart from the bit where you do the run, and have no intention of doing so – but I assume that some form of contact via social media is being encouraged.
I don’t think that Jo really wants this, any more than she wanted to play records by The Lighthouse Family in the 90s or applaud Keane for their mashup of Christina Aguilera’s Dirrty and Bootylicious by Destiny’s Child in the 00s.5 But there is always a chance that she might be delighted to receive, on an ongoing basis, pictures of various knackered joggers giving a thumbs up to the camera. We simply don’t know, and will never know: that’s the genius and charm of Jo Whiley.
At the end, someone – usually my wife – will ask me if I enjoyed my run. The correct, and polite, response to this question should always be ‘Yes, thank you!’ or something similar, particularly if the person asking is not my wife and just a neighbour that I barely know.
(The neighbour has declined to ask me again since I launched into a lengthy and self-deprecating spiel that caused a confused look to spread across his face, and me to realise that once again I had put my foot in it with a stranger by trying to be funny.)
The genuine answer — which I did also provide to my wife a couple of times, before she explained that she, too, would prefer the ‘Yes, thank you!’ response — is that I didn’t enjoy my run, because I don’t enjoy running.
It would be nice if I did; if I had discovered a new hobby, and a new passion to throw myself into. I later set myself the challenge of completing 10km, for which I naturally prepared by using the Couch to 5K app during the first half, turning around as it finished, and conducting the second part of the run without any audio encouragement. Other than the fact it felt twice as long and twice as difficult as doing 5km, I didn’t really take much away from the experience.
But, as Jo has told me over 100 times now, there are lots of different reasons to take up regular running, with many people finding that doing so helps their mental health. And, as with many things that might help your mental health, the positive effect is gradual and takes a lot of work to maintain.
In other words, it’s boring.
Looking after yourself, though, is boring. It was boring as a kid when your parents told you to brush your teeth, take a bath, or not stay up too late; and it’s boring as an adult realising that you can’t just do whatever you want, whenever you want, and expect to be fine.
It takes some work, and you aren’t rewarded with a magic moment of euphoria the moment you start doing the right things, either. The benefit comes later, in small doses, and only if you keep doing those boring things to look after yourself.
So, I’m okay with the fact that my regular appointment with Couch to 5K doesn’t have me punching the air with elation at any point, and that I instead trudge back home, Lucozade in hand, and watch the neighbour quickly scuttle back into his house while I listen dispassionately to Jo Whiley telling me once again that it might be time to consider joining a running club.
Which would be a much more normal course of action to take than endlessly repeating this final run. But the key message of the programme is to do whatever it takes to keep going; to do what works for you.
If it takes this weird routine to keep me in a healthy one, then so be it.
Let’s face it, it’s probably both.
He’s a bit mad, apparently, and in one subsequent Pret-related incident, was accused of losing his temper during a meeting with civil servants, ripping open a boxed salad and throwing tomatoes all over the place.
Regardless of their interests, there are broadly two types of men in their forties: those who still have a group of friends that they call ‘the lads’ and those that don’t. I’m in the second group.
‘Jo! Jo! Whiley! I could be your boyfriend!’ they sing, as the performance draws to a close. Don’t they know that Jo has been married to… [checks Wikipedia] … music executive Steve Morton since 1991? Some detectives they are.
I’m sure there are people who consider this era of Live Lounge covers a crime against music, while others might more charitably think of it as a bit of fun that got out of hand. Although Arctic Monkeys, during their cheeky-scamps-in-tracksuits era, could get away with a version of Girls Aloud’s Love Machine — bum notes, laughter, and all — it didn’t necessarily mean that just any indie band could cover any pop song and make it work.