I breathe great lungfuls of salty air, sweat trickling deliciously down the centre of my back. Tomorrow my thighs will be heavy and stiff. My face is hot and red. I can feel the blood pumping behind it, beneath my sodden ponytail. Adrenaline and self satisfaction charge through my body.
"Wow!" I gasp, leaning over to grab my ankles, that specific pain that accompanies tight calf muscles flaring through them immediately, "that was AMAZING!"
It is the endorphin high which characterises a person who has just been for a run.
In passing, talking to B about her life in Burma, we have chanced upon the realisation that we have both, in the past, done a bit of running, but are now sadly out of shape. On the spur of the moment, aided by the rather cloudier day and cooler temperatures, we don our running gear (resourcefully cobbled together in the case of M and I) and are off. We have just run 5k up and down the rubber plantations and out to the end of the pier. My chest and skin is burning. But I feel so good. I can conquer, have conquered the whole world in this moment. It is a pure and heady shot of happiness, which I know from experience will last for some time - imbuing me, ironically, with greater energy. And of course a certain smugness.
So I recognise this. I know it is an effect of exercise. I have known it for some time. And it's free.
So why, given any kind of choice whatsoever, will I still nearly always not bother to do it?
Somehow, no amount of such positive reinforcement actually induces me to get up, get my trainers on and get out there over such alternatives as...well, sitting on the sofa. Or eating some chocolate. Or opening the wine. Or the beer.
All of the above activities are fantastic ideas in themselves. Combined, they are positively sublime. However, they still don't hold such a shot of pure happiness, or such a long lasting one. On the contrary, sitting on the sofa all evening can make me lethargic and slightly miserable, chocolate is great while I am eating it but makes me feel sick or want more depending on quantity and will do nothing much for my body image or self respect afterwards. Alcohol is similar, and may bring on a headache.
I would still chose all those things and really enjoy it, knowing and accepting the consequences, and quite possibly be convinced that the negatives are outweighed. And maybe they are.
But why, if exercise produces similar endorphins without the accompanying sacrifices, do I not always choose exercise? Offer me chocolate and I will always take you up on it, provide a sofa and I will base my living space around it. And you don't even have to do anything for beer. I'll just find it. Suggest a run though, and I will screw up my face at the weather, spend ages thinking about it, cultivate a limp or an illness and, nine times out of ten, decline. I am pretty certain that I am not alone in this.
We simply do not know what is good for us. More than that, because it's much more than just physical effects. We don't know what it is that makes us happy.
You might assume that the answer is to hire out someone bigger than us and more shouty, who can see, objectively and brutally, what is the best path for us and then coerce, mother or bully us into it.
But look at people's response to the 'nanny state' government, to the sense of obligation or to our own parents. The fact is we become defiant and stubborn. The alternative option becomes even more delicious for its very prohibition. This has long been the case with women and chocolate.
The answer?
Well I personally don't want to live in a society in which I can't eat chips or relax or drink beer. In which the only allowable leisure activities are those which have been perfectly calibrated to deliver us precisely the right amount of satisfaction without negative consequences.
"A moment on the lips," say irritating people, usually just as I am about to bite into a heroic amount of Cadburys full fat dairy milk bar, "forever on the hips."
Yeah. But that moment on the lips feels fantastic. And I can worry about my hips afterwards. I would probably worry about them even if they were perfect anyway. So put that into your pipe and smoke it.
Oh you don't smoke. I'm so sorry. Bake it into your rice cake.
Balance, then. A little bit of what you fancy. Everything in moderation.
How dull.
The fact is balance just doesn't appeal to me. I would rather ride a heady high and be obsessive about something in an unsustainable and ultimately crashing way than coast along stolidly at a steady pace. Wearing sensible footwear.
And sometimes it's just more fun to have quite a lot of what you fancy. To have so many Yorkie bars throughout your sixth form college years that you can still not stand the smell of them twenty years later.
Don't get me wrong. Balance is the answer. But I don't like the sound of it. I can't tell what makes me happy, remember?
Also balance is hard. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a short story in which a younger man is driven to distraction by the smug boasts of an older neighbour of his exactly balanced lifestyle. The younger man is working obsessively but satisfyingly on a specific work project. His wife, sick of the toll this takes on her own lifestyle, becomes rather too enamoured with this smug older man. The young man drugs her so she sleeps for two days, enabling him to finish his project and reap the rewards. She comes to, facing the rather more inviting prospects now earned by the tunnel vision employed by her husband - and the news that the older man has died, unexpectedly of a stress induced heart attack.
"I guess," observes someone in passing, "he just couldn't handle the pressure of always being so balanced."
Perhaps we should just get on with living. Take ourselves for a satisfying run on the odd impulse, eat chocolate when we want to, quaff the beer if it tastes nice.
You know, just do what makes us happy.
Doh.
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