I was asked a question: 

What is your greatest achievement?

Daley Thompson won the Decathlon Gold Medals at the 1980 and 1984 Olympic Games.  He broke the world record for the event four times. I ran track with him.

That sounds really good except that I only did it once and that was because I wasn’t quick enough to find an excuse not to.

We were testing the new Polar Heart Rate monitor and Frank Dick, Daley’s coach, hauled me in to run with him.  At that time I was an aerobics instructor and at my peak in fitness, and I was the very first registered athletics coach in the UK with aerobics as my discipline.  Aerobics was being considered as a future Olympic sport and I wanted to be involved.

I’m an endomorphic body type – that is, even when I am at my peak fitness, I still look short and round – so I am pretty sure that I was thought of as the ‘balance check’ in this track event. The short, fat, obviously unfit (because I am short and round) woman!

We ran just 8 x 220m laps.  My body shape dictates that I am not a runner and I often joked that by the time I’d finished my laps, Daley had run his, gone home and had a shower, played a round of golf and was just finishing dinner as I crossed the finishing line.

But it was a totally different picture when the results finally came in and I had that small moment of unexpected fame.   Apparently my recovery time was faster than Daley’s, and that caused a bit of a furore because at that time, your recovery time was a major indicator to your fitness level, and on the surface it appeared I was fitter than a gold-level Olympic athlete!

Moral… Your body shape (or anything else that you consider a limiting factor to achieving your dream) can be totally wrong for what you love to do. Do it anyway.

BUT: Even better was when an elderly lady came to me to say thank you.  Two years previously she had been living in an aged care home and totally bed-bound.  I had been asked if I would run an exercise class for about 12 people who were living a dreadful life.  Every morning they would be lifted out of bed and into a chair, and in the evening they would be returned to bed. They hardly had visitors, and were all despondently sitting ‘in God’s waiting room’. Exercise and Aging was my ‘speciality subject’ and I agreed to hold a weekly class.

I researched what the popular music would have been for these folk and when I listened, some of it totally shocked me! Today’s blatant word usage and references in music is nothing to the level of shock that clever subtlety can bring. George Formby was a master! And I invite you to check out a song from 1941 by Florence Desmond The Deepest Shelter in Town.

We started with finger exercises. Touching the thumb with each finger in time to the music and we incorporated wrist movements and shoulder shrugs, and suddenly these lovely older people were wrist dancing!

Week after week we built on this. The elders moved into sitting in chairs and we started toe tapping.

Two years later one lady thanked me.  She told me that she had just made a cup of tea for herself.  The first time in ten years.  She hadn’t been able to reach for the cup or lift the kettle. Now she had both the flexibility and the strength to do this simple task that we all take for granted.  Even more than the exciting story with Daley Thompson, THIS epitomises my goals in life; but both events, for me, tell the same message.  If you have a goal – strive for it and don’t give up.  Whether the results are Olympic medals or making a cup of tea – the sense of achievement is exactly the same.

And those beautiful, funny elders? They told me as they walked into class one day that they had played hooky from the Home. They had hired a bus to take them on a pub crawl!