Your Body Was Made to Live In

Today, more than 27,500 people will line up in Cardiff for Wales’ largest mass-participation event, the Cardiff Half Marathon. There will be elite athletes at the front, first-time half-marathon runners much further back, wheelchair racers, charity fundraisers and thousands of people whose principal ambition is simply to make it across the finish line.

I rather like what that says about bodies.

We live in a culture that encourages us to look at them constantly. Are we too large, too small, too old, too wrinkled, too hairy? Does this bit sag? Should that bit be firmer? An extraordinary industry exists to persuade perfectly ordinary human beings that their bodies are projects requiring continual improvement.

Yet watch an event such as today’s race and the body suddenly becomes something else entirely.

It becomes useful.

Those thousands of bodies won’t all look alike. They couldn’t. They’ll belong to people of different ages, shapes, abilities and backgrounds. Some will complete 13.1 miles remarkably quickly. Others will walk sections, struggle, laugh, hurt and eventually cross the line several hours later.

None has failed the test of having a body.

That thought feels particularly relevant to naturism.

One of the most valuable things I have found in naturist communities is the gradual disappearance of the mythical “normal body”. Spend time amongst real people without clothes and eventually the illusion becomes impossible to sustain. Human beings simply aren’t standardised.

Naturism isn’t about displaying the body. It is about living comfortably within it.

There is a wider Welsh story here too. The latest Wellbeing of Wales report, published on 1 October, says 59% of adults had participated in sport or physical activity during the previous four weeks, yet 41% had done none. More interestingly, 35% of adults said they wanted to do more. Participation also falls substantially amongst people with limiting long-term illness.

Perhaps part of encouraging people to move more is changing the conversation from what bodies look like to what they allow us to experience.

That doesn’t have to mean running a half marathon. It might mean walking through a Welsh woodland, swimming in open water, stretching in the morning, dancing badly in the kitchen or simply noticing the feeling of autumn air against your skin.

There will be plenty of impressive bodies in Cardiff today.

But I suspect the most impressive thing about them won’t be how they look.

It will be what their owners decided to do with them.

What might change if we spent a little less time judging our bodies and a little more time actually living in them?