You can’t beat a good sweat ... unless there’s a buffet on offer

Deborah Lindsay Williams explains why she has taken up running.

People from all walks of life compete in a charity run at the Corniche Beach in Abu Dhabi. Silvia Rázgová / The National

I started running recently, a form of exercise that I despise. When I run, I listen to ridiculously loud music on my headphones, so that the entire experience functions as a mode of erasure: the discomfort of running forces me to think about my aching knees rather than the day’s aggravations; the loud music drowns out the echoes of frustrating conversations.

As I thud along the treadmill, trying to imagine myself as Usain Bolt but realising that I’m a lot closer to being Usain Bolt’s aged, arthritic grandmother, I’ve been turning over in my head a comment that a friend made to my children the day before they started the new school year. “Remember the Buddha’s words,” she said. “It is better to be kind than it is to be right.” Both my children looked at her, puzzled, and I could almost see the thought bubbles float above their heads: isn’t being right always the most important thing?

I scoffed at their incomprehension, but I have to say that in fact, like most of the Buddha’s teachings, the advice sounds simple but it’s tough to put into practice. Thus the running: if I take out my frustrations on my knees and ankles, if I sweat out the day’s annoyances, then perhaps I can become more Buddha-like in my dealings with those around me.

It’s not that I don’t like exercise – I do. A good sweat remains my favourite form of catharsis, although sweat alone isn’t enough. If that were the case, then standing outside at midday would suffice, given that summer in Abu Dhabi is like living inside a Bikram “hot yoga” studio. No, the sweat needs to come in conjunction with the painful pleasure of discovering muscles long dormant. If you’re not going to sweat, then why exercise? I asked myself that question a few weeks ago, when a woman in an exercise class with me asked the instructor to turn on the AC because she was starting to get a little warm.

A recent report in The National cited a disturbing fact: more than 66 per cent of men and 60 per cent of women in the UAE are overweight or obese. Couple that fact with Abu Dhabi’s reliance on driving, and if we’re not careful, we’re going to end up looking like the people in the movie Wall-E, cocooned in reclining loungers, unable to stand on our own feet. Those images from the movie hovered in my mind last spring, when I went hunting around sporting goods stores in search of a kick scooter, like those used by schoolchildren, but in an adult size. Store after store, the response was the same: if I wanted an electric scooter, no problem. But a scooter I powered with my own two feet? No, ma’am, that we don’t have.

If we drove less and walked more, perhaps we could create a cleaner city, with less traffic and healthier people. For that matter, maybe it’s lack of exercise that leads to the aggressive driving on UAE roads. If you’re exhausted from the gym, would you need the adrenalin rush caused by racing maniacally from the far-right merge lane to the far-left turn lane? And after a long run, wouldn’t revving your engines at a stop light seem sort of silly?

Granted, sometimes working out in a gym feels like an existential enterprise: you run on a path that leads nowhere, you push at machines that move nothing. Despite the futility of exercise in any practical sense, I feel better afterwards, even if the waistband of my trousers remains snug (I’ve had to live in a hotel for more than a month, and in the war between my will power and the dinner buffet, the buffet always wins). Do you suppose the Buddha had a treadmill, or at very least a punching bag stashed in a hidden wardrobe, and that’s the secret to his big-bellied calm?

My belief in the cathartic power of a good sweat does not mean that I will ever become one of those sinewy zealots who claim that exercise changed their lives. Death will catch us all, no matter how strenuously we avoid carbs or how far we run. Nevertheless, although I can’t outrun death, and I won’t ever be Usain Bolt (or the Buddha, for that matter), I’m pretty sure that every thudding step I take along the treadmill is an angry word I don’t utter.

Now if I could only run myself past the desserts at the hotel’s dinner buffet …

Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her novel The Time Locket (written as Deborah Quinn) is now available on Amazon