My StoryA lifetime of strength. A life well lived.

I found weightlifting at university, in a cold gymnasium with a wooden floor and a bar that had seen better days. I've never really put it down since.

In those days nobody thought of it as health. It was a sport, and a hard one. You turned up, you learned the lifts properly, and you competed against men who were better than you until you weren't the worst in the room. That apprenticeship taught me most of what I know: patience, technique, and the fact that progress is made in very small pieces.

Then life arrived, as it does. Work. A mortgage. Children. Margaret and I built a life together, and training had to fit around it rather than the other way round. Some years it was four sessions a week; some years it was one, snatched early in the morning before anyone else was awake. What mattered was that it never stopped entirely.

People often ask what changed at seventy. Honestly, very little. The weights came down, the warm-ups got longer, and I paid far more attention to how I felt the next day. But the habit — turning up, doing the work, writing it down — was already sixty years old by then.

At 83 I still train three mornings a week. I still learn something most sessions. I still get things wrong. And I still leave the gym feeling better than when I walked in, which seems to me a reasonable definition of a good morning.