(Sorrel Downer, The Times, 2006)
Question: On average, how many miles can you run in 30 minutes? Answer: Wouldn’t know. Question: Are you comfortable with swimming in deep water? Answer: If shark-free. Question: Usual weekly exercise regime? There’s a large space for details. Answer: Some walking. Filling out the forms for a two-week Wildfitness course I wondered if after a decade spent assiduously avoiding physical exercise of any form, it would have been better starting off with some remedial pilates.
Even the packing list (5/6 sets of running clothes, two pairs of “worn-in” running shoes) had given me sleepless nights. Wildfitness takes an ostensibly simple and sensible approach to fitness training: drop people into a natural environment and give them the tools to get active. Courses ranging from four days to six weeks are held in the French Alps and the Kenyan coast. The adventure element is their huge and unique appeal, but swimming down rivers, tearing through forests, scrambling up hills and dunes is combined with the stretching and training that give resilience to injury and the energy required for it. The programmes are progressive and thorough, methodically targeting different parts of the body, building you up to be fast, agile, toned and strong – fit all over. And they’re holistic, covering not only physical wellbeing but spiritual wellbeing too which translates loosely as doing things that make you feel happy and wholesome and inspired. “Swim in rivers, swing from trees, discover your inner animal” said Tara Wood, the exuberant founder. Distractions, prevarications and an utter loathing for gyms, cycling through traffic, jogging through hecklers and the argy-bargy of indoor pools had proved my downfall; I was in need of complete reconditioning, sunshine, personal instructors and two week’s full-on commitment with no hope of escape. Dismissing the Alps as hilly, I opted for Kenya, and the white sands of Watamu.
The safari-sumptuous, open-to-the-elements HQ – Baraka House – had an instantly restorative effect but before I could murmur transverse abdominals and test the bed, I was heading for a first evening session of jogging, sprinting and crawling through deep, soft sand in a new pair of blinding white trainers. Obviously not everyone was starting their quest for fitness from scratch. Aside from me there were two men and four women ranged in age from 52 to 23, most had gym memberships, Gemma ran triathlons; Holly was going on to cycle through the Masai Mara and climb Kilimanjaro. Even the UN worker who described herself as a wreck was able with ease to rest her head on her outstretched knee having attended an 8-day yoga course at Baraka House the previous week. But the aim is to push your own boundaries and set your own pace (something of which David, the Kenyan trainer with his Fitness: The Drug of Choice t-shirt and clarion cry of Come on!, seemed unaware ).
Each of us had individual tailor made programme of corrective exercises to work on drawn up following a thorough, if humiliating personal assessment on the back veranda. Poor posture, muscular inbalances, limited range of movement… my list went on, “but” added the instructor cheerfully, “we can work on those and get you feeling a lot more comfortable than you do now”. Of all the tools to get active – medicine balls, Swiss balls, surfboards, flippers – these prescriptions of exercises with their diagrams of prone cobras and scapular extensions were the most valuable.
And so we began, with a daily routine that kicked off before the day itself with a call at 6am and various feats of startling intensity – a six kilometre run along a track through the Sokoke forest reserve one day (eyes peeled when able to raise my head, for elephants), boxing – skipping and jab-jabbing for a long sweaty hour on the beach followed by flopping dressed and grateful into the sea the next. After the first of several showers, the group would reassemble for an unnaturally large breakfast, the atmosphere convivial and animated, thick with the relief at having cleared the first hurdle of the day. The rest of each morning was dedicated to training sessions in the thatched dojo; intelligent training that used squats, lunges, weights and stretches (held until burning point) to coax the body back into a healthy default position and then build it up again, sometimes with music playing, sometimes with monkeys watching.
Clearly no ordinary gym this, machine-free with its sea breeze and rush mats. But machine-based exercises frequently target isolated muscle groups, strengthening some and not others resulting in tight areas, weak areas and joint dysfunction, whereas our big movement patterns, we learn, were designed to work not just the mobilisers, but the stabiliser muscles that keep everything in place. So the Swiss balls were not just handle-free Spacehoppers as it turned out, but an unstable environment for optimum performance that improves stabiliser muscle function. In short, they work the trunk. Late afternoons were for circuit training in palm plantations or on the beach, climbing ropes, tossing coconut stumps, leaping ‘a la frog’ while swinging medicine balls, and other feats of endurance designed to replicate the stresses our muscles might encounter on a daily basis in a new fit future.
And oddly, on top of all this, we opted for more, some propelled by a strange force to volunteer themselves for kite-surfing, bodysurfing, riding; others heading to the flat roof for salutations to the sun: “This will feel really good – just hop your feet between your hands…” Fit, strong, healthy and raised in Watamu, Tara is a fine example of the benefits of active outdoor living. As an Oxford biology graduate and nutrition and lifestyle coach with a CHEK (Corrective High Performance Exercise Kinesiology) qualification she is well-qualified to devise and lead the programmes.
Wildfitness instructors follow CHEK principles and add their own areas of expertise, and Tara fuses all together in a way that gets participants hooked. “The programme’s designed to have different stages and push levels” she says. “After a couple of days you’re tired, then you start to feel vitalised, as it sinks in how much you’ve done and achieved. You get beyond a mental block, start thinking differently seeing a difference.”
By mid-course, I did indeed feel a little different. For a start I had large bruises down one side, scabs and large patches of iodine down one leg, blisters on my feet and a fat and throbbing knee having fallen off a bike, but I’d also spotted a new muscle in my thigh, and, I concluded as I fought the mosquito net and made a stiff-legged walk to the sink for a splash of water before a 6.30 session of ultimate Frisbee, I actually felt very good. Because exercise aside, there’s something hugely exhilarating – liberating even, about regaining the confidence to throw your body about a bit, being barefoot and regressing to childhood, floating through mangroves in inner tubes, throwing people to the ground in beach game tackles. Wildfitness sugars the fitness pill by ingeniously transferring workouts to the great outdoors. The pain of a lengthy thigh-deep wade out to a sandbar is lost in the joy of splashing about in the sea. And that’s all it takes. Just using your body is a great motivator to keeping it in good working order.
Where the pleasure is less obvious we are cheered and fortified by knowing how the pain we suffer will benefit us. How by stringing together squats, press-ups, skipping, boxing, sprints and lunges on a hot evening we are increasing our anaerobic threshold and building strength in a functional and comprehensive way; how, through endless bursts of sprinting and (partial) recovery round and round a grassy airstrip, we are improving our velocity V02 max and lactate threshold which for various complicated reasons would translate one day as going faster, further if so required. As the crowd of small children, many of them carrying smaller children on their backs, were only to keen to demonstrate.
Workshops are a chance to loll in the shade, also to learn about the wider ramifications of keeping fit and healthy; about stress management, homeopathy (Mike who had nosedived into sand gets hypericum for a grazed forehead, I get arnica and calendula for my leg, Gemma gets something to pre-empt tears at the end of a journey therapy session), and diet. Tara gives an animated argument against coffee, excess sugar, processed foods, Diet Coke, diets, pasteurised milk, food fads, plastic packaging and preservatives, and recommends we eat according to our metabolic type as proposed by William L Wolcott and Trish Fahey in The Metabolic Typing Diet 2000.
Mid-course, the group is clearly in transition, often to be found with copies of Survival of the Fittest by Dr Mike Stroud, The new Power Program: Protocols for Maximum Strength by Dr Michael Colgan, Fats that heal, Fats that Kill and Colon Flora, reading silently. We become so savvy that the conversation over meals is peppered with observations like “honey has a high GI”. We understand the benefits of food type rotation; that we’ll get red meat, white meat or fish for a full day and then not see it for four. And when dinner includes sweet potato and rice and a pudding, the table falls silent, because we know that carbohydrates today mean endurance tomorrow. It means the Mida Swim.
The Mida Creek is a wide and choppy tidal channel, and the swim is 4km down the middle of it. Something of a Wildfitness rite of passage, the fastest it had been swum was one hour, five minutes, and the slowest, four hours. We’d be escorted by dugouts and Vaseline was recommended. As my recent experience of swimming had been limited to getting to the wet bar in a Miami pool, I approached this task with considerable trepidation and, accordingly, after 200 metres decided I’d had enough. But then something strange happened. Perhaps it was the carbohydrates or circuit training, or perhaps it was newfound zest for life, but energy and determination kicked in and on I went.
The course, of course, is just a start but it’s created its own momentum. After two weeks I have returned with Swiss ball, boxing gloves and pads, ankle supports, stretch bands, good posture, yoga mat, reading list and a metabolic food type analysis to set me on the right track. What will keep me there is the real, smug self-satisfaction of achieving new goals and the surprise discovery that fitness is actually a default setting. www.wildfitness.com
