Aged nine, at my school’s sports day, we ran a race in threes, each little group encircled by a plastic hoop. My team came last, and the other two girls shouted at me for being so slow. This experience deepened my already low level of enthusiasm for anything sports-related.
By my teens, my friends and I often sloped off to a greasy spoon café near school instead of going to netball or lacrosse. We hid in its dingy basement, smoking Marlboros and eating chips. As a healthy, slim 15-year-old, the notion that exercise was good for my body went right over my head. And back in the 1980s, no one talked about how it could help your mind, too; how it might have been an ally during those years of changing hormones and teenage angst.
In my 20s,
