How a cancer diagnosis led to a 60-year-old’s unexpected bodybuilding | UK | News

England’s World Cup-winning prop forward Phil Vickery has stepped on a bodybuilding stage – to much fanfare and media coverage – at the grand old age of 50. And I know that, like everyone else, I should be saying, “Well done Phil, that’s amazing”. But to be honest, what I’m really, slightly more ungraciously, thinking is “50? Pah! Try 60, mate!” Because that’s what I did, to the complete astonishment of family and friends – but mainly to the complete astonishment of me – a few weeks shy of my 61st birthday. A bodybuilding competition. Yep, standing on a stage practically naked, smothered with gravy browning, in a pair of absurdly tight budgie-smugglers which were their own outrage against public decency. When, by all that’s holy, I should’ve been down the pub, downing a Stella and toking on a B&H with the lads.

So how did it come to this? One word: cancer. Three years ago, in a very cramped, eye-wateringly over-bright room at Brighton Hospital I heard the words: “Mr Baldwin we have discovered a large tumour…” Yeah, that’ll do it. Everyone who hears these words probably has their own unique “life moment”. I know I had one. I was never scared. I never slipped into movie-style “give it to me straight doc… how long have I got?” mode. But it did remind me, in the starkest possible way, we are all on borrowed time and, as Jim Morrison so memorably noted, no-one here gets out alive. We spend our lives burying this fact, and it probably keeps us sane. But it also probably limits the possibilities of who we are and, more importantly, who we could be.

We put things off, telling ourselves we will do them “when the time is right” – when all too often this really just camouflages our lack of courage and our not having the guts to have a go (and maybe fail spectacularly of course). We are also terrified of being judged, or worse.. of being mercilessly mocked, as only we Britons can. But, cancer will cut through that like the proverbial hot knife.

It is no wonder cancer survivors start running marathons, scaling mountains, taking up salsa or finally finishing that novel. It’s because they have to. It’s carpe diem, and it’s because they know – they’ve been shown – that tomorrow is going to be too late. I was no different, and walked out of that hospital with a laser-like clarity: First, that RIGHT NOW is “when the time is right” and second that I was not going to lie on my deathbed saying “I wish”… The second one was non-negotiable.

So I made a list. And yes I do wonder if this list-making was some kind of helpful denial, a practical way of silencing, or at least muffling, that small voice in the back of my head saying “you’ve got this thing growing inside you which wants to end your existence on planet Earth.” That’s quite an annoying little voice.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with the details, but in remarkably short order some really clever people using some really clever science cured me. (If you are unlucky enough to get a cancer diagnosis – and half of us will – don’t despair. Miracles, I learned, are now the everyday commonplace.)

So, after breathing the tiniest of sighs of relief, I got back to that list. I’d trained in the gym quietly for years, and had often had a vague notion of maybe competing one day. But I was 60. That’s roughly 25 years beyond the point people will tell you a bodybuilding contest is possible, or indeed advisable.

But cancer doesn’t half make you say “b******s to that”, pretty much on a daily basis. So I picked a competition, the South Coast Championships, and worked out a plan. Most people think a bodybuilding contest is about lifting huge weights, or feats of strength but it’s not. It’s actually just a dieting competition. It’s about spending five months not having a pint, not eating cake, not cracking open a tub of Celebrations while you veg-out to Strictly and, most importantly, trying a million different ways to make chicken and rice seem interesting.

(I failed at the latter and was reduced to whizzing up a sort of crap lukewarm chicken soup in the blender two to three times a day – yum). And it’s all optical illusions and smoke and mirrors. People say “oooh you looked massive” – I wasn’t, I was three stones lighter than my normal weight. I’d not seen those figures on the scales since I was about 12!

It’s simply about shedding subcutaneous fat to such a ridiculous extent you’d swear you can see your internal organs. And because your muscles are so much closer to the surface and thus more “defined” you appear bigger. Compare Phil Vickery’s bodybuilding pics to when he was in his England prime – he’s half the size!

Oh, and on competition day you might look fit (and in Instagram-land perhaps even“hot”!) but your body is screaming “can you stop starving me to death please!” It is, be assured, extremely unhealthy. But it does look quite cool. There’s another aspect too. The mental side of it. After his competition Vickery wrote “lifting weights has helped me physically, yes, but mentally more than anything”. And I can only concur.

For me “lifting” is a bit like bloke yoga, a chance to turn down the background noise and zone out for an hour or so. Trust me, when you’re lying on your back pushing 120kg of cold steel you’re not worrying about whether you can pay the leccy bill or if you’ve got enough fish fingers for the kids’ tea; you are entirely in the moment and of the moment. Bloke yoga.

But the psychodrama of bodybuilding can be overplayed. Let’s be honest, most people go to a gym to look good naked. And, since you asked, yes, not bad! There’s a public perception too that a bodybuilding competition is just a vain and slightly odd beauty contest. But it’s not – well, not solely.

It’s a test of discipline, of whether you have the stones and the mental grit to set an extraordinary physical goal and achieve it. Because, trust me, in the last few weeks when you can barely lift a glass of water and your brain is in a constant fog, it’s not about the strength of your body, it’s about the strength of your mind.

I won’t lie, competing in a bodybuilding show was way out of my comfort zone, it was very hard, and in terms of pure cost/benefit it was all cost and very little benefit. Except it wasn’t. There was this huge and unexpected sense of achievement. Admittedly only to me – but in the end that is always true in every case in life isn’t it?

Oh, and I came fourth out of nine! But who cares? Certainly not me. There’s a weird conclusion to draw from all this, which is that I remain strangely indebted to my cancer. Not because it threatened to take away my life but because it reminded me to live a life worth taking away. You know, when I think about it, maybe we should all have a brush with death once in our lives…