Building a Physical Pension: Not Every Run Needs a PB

Why I’m increasingly running for the person I want to be in twenty years, not just the time on my watch.

As a deputy headteacher, Andy Lewis spends much of his working life looking at numbers. But when running becomes another exercise in measuring performance, is it time to reconsider what success really looks like?

In this article, Andy reflects on running, school leadership and the idea of building a physical pension — investing in the person we hope to be twenty or thirty years from now.

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I spend a remarkable amount of my working life looking at numbers. Attendance figures, examination results, behaviour points, detentions, progress data and all the other things that we measure in schools. Some of it is incredibly useful, some probably less so, but as a deputy headteacher, I know how important good data can be in understanding what is happening across a school, and particularly identifying when something isn’t quite right.

Yet when I finally escape school at the end of the day and go for a run, I seem to have developed another obsession with numbers!

My Garmin tracks my pace, distance, heart rate, cadence and all manner of other statistics, before Strava provides another opportunity to look at them all again in a slightly different format. Then there’s my MyZone heart rate tracking and MEPs. I can spend a surprising amount of time analysing my runs, comparing times and wondering whether I’m getting faster – or better by some other obscure metric. I also enjoy looking back at previous races, particularly the ones where I’ve done well, or have particularly fond memories.

I do like a target. I’ve completed two marathons, twenty half marathons and have a number of races already booked for 2027, including my first ultra. I like having something to train for, and still get considerable satisfaction from achieving a PB (normally for the year, not all time any more!). After all, when you’ve spent months preparing for a race, often getting up at ridiculous times in the morning or squeezing runs around work and family commitments, you want to see something for all that effort.

But I’ve been wondering a little more recently about whether I occasionally allow the numbers to tell me how much I’ve enjoyed something, rather than the other way around.

What was the run actually for?

One of the best things I’ve done in recent years is to start running to and from school. A few years into the job, I discovered that Barking station to Forest Gate is almost exactly 5km. It seems obvious now, given that I need to make the journey anyway (by tube and foot), but it took me a few years to realise that I could simply turn part of my commute into exercise.

There are days when I leave school with quite a lot going round in my head. Conversations to think about, decisions I’ve made, challenges I didn’t solve, things I need to remember for tomorrow and perhaps a few things that didn’t quite go to plan. Running home gives me an opportunity to work through some of this, sometimes with music, occasionally a podcast, but quite often nothing at all. By the time I get home, I nearly always feel better, and hopefully my family gets a slightly better version of me too.

Yet I can arrive home, look at my Garmin and find myself slightly disappointed that I’ve run slower than usual. My average pace wasn’t particularly impressive, perhaps my heart rate was a little higher, or Strava has decided that my fitness has declined. I know this is somewhat absurd, particularly as I wasn’t actually trying to run quickly in the first place. The run has done exactly what I wanted it to do, but somehow I’ve allowed a different measure to determine whether it was successful or not.

I suppose this is something we can become quite used to in education too. Targets, percentages, measures of progress and improvement are all part of our working lives, and generally with very good reason. I certainly wouldn’t want to lead a school without good information about how our students are doing. But I do occasionally wonder if we become so accustomed to measuring things that we start to assume everything important needs to produce some evidence of improvement. A good friend of mine in the RE community, Dawn Cox, often used to remind me, “you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it”.

Paying into something else

A few years ago, I wrote something on social media about what I called my ‘physical pension plan’. I’d been exercising alongside a group of people in their seventies, who were remarkably fit and active. I remember being impressed, but also wondering what they had been doing over the previous twenty or thirty years to get themselves to that point. I wanted to be like them, still turning up to train and enjoying exercise, even if I was never quite as fit as some of them – even today!

The pension comparison seemed quite appropriate, especially working in education where there are plenty of staffroom conversations about how much we contribute, when we might retire and whether we’ll actually get there. We spend years making financial contributions towards a retirement we hope to enjoy, but perhaps give less thought to what physical condition we might be in when that time comes.

I’m now 42, and whilst I still want to run faster, I’m increasingly conscious that I’d quite like to still be doing this in twenty or thirty years. I want to keep exploring new places, walking for miles on holiday, being active with my boys and perhaps grandchildren one day. I enjoy a beer, have a terrible sweet tooth and certainly don’t make all the right decisions about my health, but I do know that I feel considerably better when I’m exercising regularly.

Perhaps the investment isn’t really being made through the marathons, medals or PBs, enjoyable as they are. It’s probably those ordinary runs, including the ones where I’m tired, not particularly quick, or where I decide that five kilometres is quite enough for today. Not every contribution to a financial pension is particularly exciting, and perhaps the physical one is much the same.

As a Catholic school leader, I’ve also been doing quite a lot of reading recently around Pope Leo XIV’s Drawing New Maps of Hope, his letter on Catholic education. There is plenty in it that challenges us to think about the purpose of education and the formation of the whole person, rather than reducing success to efficiency or measurable outcomes. Towards the end, he encourages educators to “raise your eyes” and consider where they are going, and why.

I don’t suppose Pope Leo had Garmin watches and Strava in mind when he wrote that, but I’ve found myself wondering whether it is quite good advice for runners too. Perhaps occasionally I need to look up from the watch, enjoy where I am, and remember why I started doing this in the first place. It’s also a useful reminder for those of us working in education, where we can spend so much time focused on the futures of the young people we teach that we perhaps don’t always give enough attention to our own.

I don’t want to pretend that running somehow solves all the pressures of working in schools. It certainly doesn’t, and there are plenty of occasions when work, family life or simply being tired mean that I don’t get out for a run. Nor do I think we should start making colleagues feel guilty about not exercising enough, when so many are already struggling to balance everything expected of them.

But I do think that there is something worth considering about the person we hope to be at the end of our careers, and what we might be doing now to make that possible.

I’ll still keep entering races and chasing PBs, and I suspect I’ll continue checking my Strava statistics far more often than is really necessary. There are probably still a few times and distances I’d like to achieve before I have to accept that age is catching up with me, although I’m not entirely sure when that point will arrive!

And I hope that in twenty or thirty years, I’ll still be getting out for a run, perhaps a bit slower, with a few more aches and pains, and probably with a Garmin telling me that my performance is declining – but that my Fitness Age is less than my actual age (I am 42.5 in real life, 39.5 in Garmin life).

Although if I’m still running at seventy, I suspect I’ll be rather pleased just to be out there with one foot in front of the other…

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Andy Lewis is Deputy Headteacher at St Bonaventure’s School in East London. A keen runner who has completed two marathons and twenty half marathons, he enjoys balancing the demands of school leadership with running, family life and writing about education and religious education.

Connect with Andy on Strava: Andy Lewis

Website and writing: mrlewisre.co.uk

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