So today I can say 'I ran'. This is a new experience. Possibly I could even stretch as far as to say 'I am a runner'. This is literally true: I did a passable impersonation of someone running on a treadmill for 25 minutes at 6am this morning. But the words feel odd. Like suddenly saying 'I am a writer' because I scribbled two cliched lines of a rhyming couplet on the back of a pad of paper, or 'I am an explorer' because I took a different route to work. I wonder when (if?) I will feel like I can say 'I run' and not expect the person opposite to scoff.

Possibly more pressingly, there is the additional worry of whether I'm even going to survive this whole experience at all. My team at work have convinced me that athletic endeavour is critical for our joint success, that I need to experience directly the benefits and joy of atheletic activity. They plan to record the whole enterprise and assure me that I will be fine, that I will succeed and improve. I suspect that the whole thing might be an elaborate revenge plot and/or a means of generating enormously embarassing photos for the next agency company meeting, but I have no means of proving this and since there are about 15 of them and only one of me, I am going along with it. And to be honest, it also feels a bit exciting and interesting. I don't think of myself as an athlete in any way: would I be a different person if I became one? I'm intrigued to find out.