RTS tells us how in his quest to be a men’s magazine cover star, he became a slave to stretching and why cloning himself was the only answer!

Respect The Stretch

   Vin demonstrates the single man's Karma Sutra

I’m in for a long stretch. Probably for life! My crime occurred eleven years ago. With my life in a period of change I wasn’t exercising as much as I ought to have been.

An ‘idle’ demon made a voodoo doll of me, and stuck a pin in my lower back, just above the hip joint on the left side. (This was almost certainly a work-related problem caused by ignorance and poor ergonomics.) For a couple of weeks I ignored it. Eventually my foolishness caught up with me; my back muscles were locked-up.

After a month on the floor, spaced out on muscle relaxants, I had my first bout with a physiotherapist. She did some massage and ultrasound therapy, and prescribed some simple stretches. She also advised me to do more running and cycling. Nice! This was my kind of advice.

After that, on hands and knees I’d arch my back upwards before dipping it down and sticking my bum and chin in the air. For some reason this became known as my ‘porno’ pose (I have no idea why. Honestly!)

For a while this did the trick. My back was good, the running and biking was good. Life was good. Rarely, I’d feel a little unwanted stiffness (there’s nothing worse!), and this always seemed associated with tight hamstrings. No problem then! I simply added hamstrings to my morning stretch routine.

Training for the coast-to-coast run meant a significant increase in the amount of running I was doing. This was a good thing. “Keep running” the physio had said, and she had been right. It definitely helped.

But pushing the distances brought new stiffness in the calf and quad muscles. Only one thing for it, the stretching routine had to be extended. By this time it was taking about twenty minutes to hit the floor, loosen my back, extend the hamstrings, release tension in tight quads and relax tired calf muscles. I had to set the alarm clock ever earlier to make sure I wasn’t late for work.

I wasn’t the only one at it. My running buddy, Vin, was becoming ‘black-belt Ninja-master’ of the exotic never-seen-before stretch.

We’d stop mid way into long training runs and he’d contort himself into all manner of seemingly impossible positions. Some of them were dynamic stretches where he’d writhe about, limbs twisting like a basket of cobras. It was as if he was working his way through the ‘single man’s Karma Sutra’.

A strive towards a higher level of total-body conditioning brought the addition of some upper body exercises to the routine. Core strengthening and press-ups were added.

I became a fanatic. Hooked on the desire for a flexible body I’d be stretching before going to bed as well as in the morning and every time I ran.

I blamed those super-fit looking models on the front of men’s magazines. Nobody really looks like that. The pictures must be airbrushed. They should be banned. Young children could be duped into a life of exercise trying to copy them. This would pose a serious health risk to the fast food and computer games industries.

A foolish training session - sprinting too fast up a slope too steep, without (surprisingly) sufficient warm-up - partially tore an Achilles tendon. Then, several months later, anterior knee pain began to niggle.

Both these events resulted in further visits to the physio’s, and would you believe it, new additions to the stretching regime. Achilles rehab and ilio-tibial band flexibility drills were included. I now needed a calendar rather than a watch to time my routine.

The stretching had finally exceeded critical mass. The routine was now taking so long that I was having to get up before I’d even gone to bed.

I didn’t know whether I was doing me pre-sleep stretch, post-sleep stretch, pre-run or post-run stretch. It all merged into one continuous bout of contortionism. There weren’t enough hours in the day. There was nothing else for it. I had myself cloned!

To avoid confusing the Kids by having two Dads around I hid my clone away in the loft. I had created my own Dorian Gray.

In a parallel to Oscar Wilde’s ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’, my clone spent all day in the attic performing stretches, leaving me free to pursue a beautiful flexible existence.

He steadily becomes more stiff and crumbly whilst I maintain perfect youthful suppleness. I can even touch my toes again – with the back of my head!

So far it’s going fine. (I stuck my head through the loft hatch the other day and saw my clone working hard to ensure his ear lobes maintained just the right degree of flexibility.) But I get the feeling it’s all going to end in tears.

There’s a moral to this tale: it’s good to stretch, but don’t get carried away.

So, for my clone and I the stretch goes on. There appears to be no time off for good behaviour.

Respect the Stretch. 

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