The Curry, The Pint and The Months Off

There was a period in my younger years where I would set the alarm for five in the morning, arrive at work by half past seven, and not leave until six in the evening. By the time I had made it home and changed, it was approaching eight o'clock at night. I would train anyway. Not because I was disciplined beyond what is reasonable — though I believed at the time that I was — but because I did not yet understand what I was doing to myself. The sessions were poor. The sleep was poor. The recovery was non-existent. I was running on ambition and stubbornness and very little else, and I was paying for it in ways I could not fully see at the time.

Work had taken over. Not dramatically, not in a way that announced itself clearly — it had crept in gradually, the way it always does. The hours extended week by week. The sessions became shorter, then less frequent, then rare. For months I barely trained. I told myself it was temporary. I told myself I would get back to it properly when things calmed down. Things did not calm down, because they never do — you have to make the space, or the space does not appear.

I am telling you this because this site is built on honesty. And the honest truth is that I have not always got this right. Not even close.

The Myth of the Perfect Training Life

There is a version of a fitness professional that the industry likes to present — someone who never misses a session, never eats the wrong thing, never has a period where life wins and training loses. That person does not exist. Or if they do, they are miserable and they will not last. The pursuit of perfection in fitness is one of the most reliable paths to quitting altogether, because perfection is not sustainable and the inevitable deviation from it is experienced as failure rather than simply as life.

I have had curries. I have had pints. I have had periods of months where training barely happened and the lifestyle I advocate on this site looked nothing like the one I was actually living. I am fifty years old and I have been training since I was eighteen. That is over three decades. In that time there has been plenty that was not perfect. There have been injuries — two ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) reconstructions — that forced periods of inactivity. There has been the daily management of Type 1 diabetes, which affects training in ways that healthy people do not have to think about. There have been periods of intense work that crowded everything else out. And there have been periods where I simply did not want to train and chose not to.

"The people who last are never the ones who do it perfectly. They are the ones who keep coming back."

— oldschoolPT

None of that has stopped me. None of it has defined me. Because the thing that keeps someone training for thirty years is not an absence of disruption — it is the understanding that disruption is normal and that returning from it is simply part of the process.

What Balance Actually Means

Balance is one of those words that gets used so often it begins to lose its meaning. What it does not mean, in the context of fitness, is doing a little bit of everything and committing to nothing. What it does mean is building a relationship with training and with your body that is sustainable across a lifetime — not across eight weeks, not across a twelve-week programme, but across years and decades.

A curry is not a problem. A pint on a Friday evening after a hard week is not a problem. A week without training because work has been relentless and the body needs rest is not a problem. What would be a problem is if the curry became every evening, the pint became every evening, and the weeks without training became months without intention. The difference between balance and self-sabotage is not what you do occasionally — it is what you do consistently.

The people I have trained and observed who sustain genuine fitness over the long term are not the ones with the most rigid regimes. They are the ones who have learned to flex without breaking. They train hard when they can. They rest when they should. They enjoy themselves without guilt and return to training without drama. They do not treat a missed session as a catastrophe or a good meal as a moral failure. They simply keep going, imperfectly, for a very long time.

The Five O'Clock Alarm

I look back on those early mornings differently now than I did at the time. I was young, I was ambitious, and I genuinely believed that the harder I pushed in every direction simultaneously, the further I would go. What I did not understand — and what I wish someone had told me clearly — is that the body does not respond to ambition. It responds to stimulus, recovery, nutrition and sleep. Remove two of those four and the other two stop working properly. Remove all four, as I came close to doing during that period, and the whole system begins to fail in ways that are not immediately obvious but accumulate quietly and express themselves eventually.

The training I was doing at eight o'clock at night after thirteen hours at work was not training. It was going through the motions in a state of partial exhaustion. I would have been better served going home, eating well, sleeping eight hours and training properly the following morning with something left in the tank. I know that now. It took a few years and a few painful lessons to fully accept it.

The Months Away

Every person who trains seriously for long enough will have periods away from it. Injury, illness, work, family, loss, exhaustion — life does not pause to accommodate a training schedule and it never will. The question is not whether those periods will happen. They will. The question is what your relationship with training is when they end.

If training has always been a punishment — something you do to atone for eating the wrong thing or to force the body into a shape it does not naturally want to be — then returning from a break is psychologically very difficult. The absence feels like failure. The return feels like starting over with an awareness of everything that has been lost. That framing makes people quit permanently.

If training has become something you genuinely value — something that gives back more than it takes, that improves your mood, your energy, your sleep, your capacity to deal with everything else — then returning from a break is simply returning to something good. There is no drama, no self-recrimination, no need to make up for lost time. You pick up where you left off, reduce the load slightly to account for the detraining that has occurred, and you go again.

"You pick up where you left off and you go again. That is the whole secret — and nobody who has kept going for thirty years will tell you otherwise."

— oldschoolPT

Getting the Balance Right

There is no formula for this. Everyone's balance point is different. Some people can train six days a week and thrive. Others train three days a week and are in excellent physical condition. Some people eat very carefully throughout the week and enjoy themselves freely at the weekend. Others maintain a general standard without anything as structured as that. What works is what you can sustain — not for a month, but for years.

What I can tell you from experience is this. The curry will not undo a week of good training. The pint will not undo the progress of a month. The months away from training, as difficult as they feel at the time, will not undo what has been built over years — because the adaptations that come from consistent training go deeper than muscle size or cardiovascular fitness. They become part of how the body functions and how the mind operates. That does not disappear in a few weeks. It takes time to build and it is more resilient than most people believe.

So enjoy the curry. Have the pint if you want it. Take the rest when the body demands it. And come back to training not because you have to, but because you understand what it gives you — and because you know, from experience, that you are better with it than without it.

I am fifty years old. I have Type 1 diabetes. I have had two ACL reconstructions. I have had periods of intense work that pushed training to the margins. I have had months away. I have had curries and pints and late nights and early mornings and everything in between.

I am still here. Still training. Still in better physical condition than I have any right to be given everything else. Not because I did it perfectly — but because I kept coming back.