Simple Joy Of Jogging

Exclusively for Glorious, Sports Team drummer Al Greenwood reveals a poem inspired by her relationship to running and newfound approach to exercise

By Al Greenwood

I have always enjoyed sport, as long as I can remember. Yet, as I left education, physical activity increasingly played a cameo role in my life and schedule, and my passion for football concurrently went from occupying muddy pitches to pub rooms. In the early days of my career, I was travelling with a full-time job, and squeezing band rehearsals and gigs into the gaps this left me. My sporadic sessions at the gym were punctuated by my TV series of choice and functioned solely to pacify the guilt caused by my hedonistic lifestyle outside of the office. As the band developed, I was given the opportunity to quit my job, leave my flat and life in London, and work on music full-time. The gym membership was one of the lesser mourned sacrifices.

It was the lack of a local gym and excess of guilt that eventually led me to start jogging. I remember counting the minutes of each early ‘run,’ outraged at the lack of on-machine screen relief to distract. Yet at some point over the past two years, this guilt-based relationship to jogging (and exercise more broadly) morphed into something completely different; perhaps more healthy, increasingly obsessive, but certainly more positive.

Poem & Voiceover Al Greenwood (drummer of Sports Team), Director of Photography & Editor Dillon Steele, Art Direction & Graphics Root

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