Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 8: Exercise

Pant, pant, pant.

I stood bent double outside the kebab shop with my hands on my knees and the bloke inside leaned out the hatch.

Erol. Who’d been frying out of that same hatch since I was at school. Who had a Tottenham scarf nailed up behind the fryer and three photos of three kids Blu-Tacked next to it, gone curly and brown at the edges from the heat, and who was putting all three of them through college one doner kebab at a time and would tell you about it whether you asked or not.

"Sam! You all right out there? You having a heart attack? Because I’ll be honest with you, all I’ve got back here is a fire blanket and a strong opinion."

"No chips, Erol," I gasped. "New me."

"New you."

He leaned on the counter and looked me up and down, deeply unimpressed, wiping his big hands on his apron.

"New you looks exactly like old you, but sweatier and sadder. What’s all this in aid of, eh? You running from somebody? You owe money? Because if you owe money, I’m telling you now, my cousin Hakan, he knows a fella..."

"I don’t owe anyone money, Erol. I’m just sorting myself out."

"Hm." He weighed that up the way Erol weighed up everything, slow and serious, like a magistrate passing sentence on a portion of chips.

"About time, then. Your dad, God rest him, used to stand right there where you’re stood, off the late shift, and put the world to rights with me till two in the morning. He’d have clipped your ear, the state you’ve let yourself get into."

He softened, just a touch.

"Good lad. Go on. Run. Don’t die outside my shop, it’s bad for business, a dead regular."

And then, because he was Erol, and could no more send a man home without feeding him than he could stop breathing, "...You sure, though? Got the good chips on. Fresh batch, just in."

"...Go on then. Small one."

"Small one," he agreed gravely, and turned away already shovelling out a large.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, all right. But the point is, I went. Old Sam would’ve talked about going. Old Sam was a five-year plan that never left the sofa.

New Sam went out and ran half a mile and then ruined it with chips, yeah, fine, but he went, and that, I was starting to understand, was the entire difference between the two of us. One did. One only ever dreamed.

I was limping the long way home, chips warm in one hand and my knee mutinying loudly in the other half of my body, when the system pinged. Soft. White. Cold as a fridge door opening.

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[SYSTEM] Right, Samuel. A word. Before you go ahead and properly ruin yourself.

[SYSTEM] Knee assessment, while we’re stood under this streetlight: medial ligament, approximately fifty percent integrity.

Surrounding musculature, wasted from six months of disuse and a lot of sitting in portacabins feeling sorry for yourself. Biomechanics, currently compensating to the right side with a pelvic tilt I could spot from orbit.

[SYSTEM] A man of your age, with a knee of that age, who decides to begin his recovery by jogging on tarmac without ringing a physio first, deserves what he gets. Which, on current trajectory, is a knee brace by August and a coaching career round number two. Sit on a bench. Read this.

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REHAB PROTOCOL: LEFT KNEE

Weeks 1-2: No tarmac. Grass only. Half-mile maximum. Bodyweight squats to ninety degrees, three sets of fifteen, every other day. Calf raises. Glute bridges. Single-leg balance, two minutes per side. Ice ten minutes after every session.

Weeks 3-4: Progress distance on grass. Add walking lunges. Resistance band sidesteps if you can find one in a charity shop, which you can.

Weeks 5-8: Cautious return to tarmac. Loaded squats to fifty percent bodyweight only. No twisting under load. Ongoing: Roll the IT band you’ve been ignoring since you were sixteen. Stretch the calves. Eight hours of sleep. Eat your bloody chicken.

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[SYSTEM] Follow this and in twelve weeks you’ll have a working knee. Skip it and you’ll have a bag of crisps in a brace by Halloween.

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I sat down on the low wall outside Erol’s, knee throbbing, chips going cold on my lap, and I read the whole thing twice through.

"Twelve weeks?" I said, out loud, to nobody.

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[SYSTEM] Twelve weeks for a working knee, Samuel. Six for a functioning one. Four for one that doesn’t grass you up walking up the stairs. Take your pick.

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"I’ll have a football club to run inside five," I said. "I’m going to be stood on a touchline shouting at men."

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[SYSTEM] Then you had better start being extraordinarily clever about your hamstrings, hadn’t you.

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Cheeky sod.

I went home, ate the chips, and did the bloody squats on the carpet by the radiator. Sixteen of them, mind, not fifteen. A man has to keep one small rebellion going against the magic football panel or it gets ideas above its station.

I followed every line of that protocol after that first night. Bodyweight squats on a carpet that smelled of damp.

Calf raises off the step outside the flat. Glute bridges on a yoga mat I’d nicked out of Mum’s airing cupboard and pretended was for "stretching." Single-leg balances in the queue at the bookies when I thought no one was looking.

Every other evening, a careful half-mile jog on the grass of the park, never on the tarmac, the knee easing off the threats by about night five if I went gentle round the corners.

Got the diet half sorted on a budget, which mostly meant swapping three energy drinks for one and eating eggs like they were going out of fashion, because eggs are about the only thing a skint man can afford that doesn’t actively hate his body.

No gym yet. No protein powder. No personal trainer.

That stuff cost money, and money was sixteen days away. But the protocol was free, and the grass was free, and the press-ups on the manky carpet were free, and discipline, it turns out, is the one thing in this world they can’t put a price tag on or take away from you when the board votes you out.

Now. In the interest of full honesty, I should admit the park wasn’t purely about cardiovascular fitness.

Because somewhere around night three, I clocked her.

There was a woman who trained in the park the same time I did, every evening, down by the old bandstand. Running drills, lunges, sprints, properly grafting, ponytail swinging, and she was, and I’m going to try and be a gentleman about this but I’m also not going to lie to you, absolutely stunning.

The kind of stunning that makes a man forget he is meant to be jogging and run more or less face-first into a bin. CLANG. (Night four. The bin won. The bin won handsomely.)

And here’s the cruel joke of my entire second life, right there.

Twenty-four years old. Single. Back in a young body for the first time in sixteen years, heart still working, everything still in full working order, thank you very much.

A gorgeous woman doing lunges forty feet away in the summer evening. And what does the universe, in its infinite generosity, hand me for a moment such as this?

A scouting report.

She jogged past, gave me the polite little half-nod one runner gives another, and before I could rearrange my sweaty red face into anything resembling charming, the panel bloomed up over her head, helpful as you like:

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Name: Unknown

"Player": Recreational · Stamina: 16 · Natural Fitness: 17 · Pace: 15 · Determination: 18 Engine on her like a Championship full-back. Comfortably out of your league, son. Keep running.

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"...Mate," I said. Out loud. To my own brain. "I did not ask for her Natural Fitness."

But the system, miserable matchmaker that it was, would not give me the one thing I actually wanted, which was her name, because a name has to be earned and so far I’d earned a stitch, a sweat patch shaped like Italy, and a deeply personal relationship with a municipal bin.

So I did what I always did.