Wentworth: IELTS General Training Reading practice test

Mondays 19.00 to 20.30 in the main hall. £6 a session, or £50 for a block of ten. Rackets and shuttles are provided and there is nothing extra to pay for them. You must wear indoor shoes with non-marking soles, and these are checked at the door; ordinary trainers with black soles will not be admitted. Numbers are capped at sixteen and places are booked through the centre app.

Tuesdays and Thursdays 07.00 to 08.00 in the main pool. £5.50 a session, or included at no extra charge in a full membership. This is an adult session and nobody under the age of sixteen may take part, whatever their ability. We ask that you are able to swim fifty metres without stopping before you join, as the session works in continuous lengths.

Wednesdays 10.30 to 12.00 on the outdoor pitch. There is no charge at present, as the session is paid for by a grant which runs until next March; a small fee is likely after that. The session is for players aged fifty and over. Running is not permitted and is penalised by a free kick to the other side, which is the whole point of the game.

Saturdays, with a session for ages five to seven at 09.00 and one for ages eight to twelve at 10.15. The cost is £96 a term, paid in advance, and there is currently a waiting list for the younger group. Parents and carers are asked to watch from the viewing gallery upstairs and not to come onto the floor of the hall at any point.

Sundays 17.00 to 18.00 in studio 2. £8 a session and there is no need to book. Mats, blocks and straps are laid out for you, although you are very welcome to bring your own equipment if you prefer. The class is not suitable during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy; please speak to the instructor before the session rather than during it.

Open Tuesday to Sunday from 10.00 to 21.00. A session costs £11, which covers the hire of shoes and a harness. Anybody who has not climbed at this centre before must first complete an induction lasting about forty minutes, which costs £20 and is booked separately from your first climb. The induction is valid indefinitely and does not need repeating.

Mass participation running barely existed within living memory. The first New York marathon, in 1970, had a hundred and twenty-seven starters and fifty-five finishers, all of them running laps of a park. The London marathon began in 1981. What was in the 1960s an activity for a few thousand club athletes now produces several million finishers a year across the world's road races, and the free weekly timed runs that began in a London park in 2004, organised entirely by volunteers, have registered many millions of participants across more than twenty countries.

This ought to be more puzzling than it usually seems. The activity is voluntary, it costs money rather than earning it, almost nobody taking part is competing for anything except a number on a watch, and a significant proportion of participants describe the experience itself as unpleasant. It also grew precisely as physical effort was being removed from ordinary work. A society spent two centuries mechanising labour so that people would not have to exhaust themselves, and the result is that several million of them now do it at the weekend, on purpose, having paid for the privilege.

One line of explanation comes from human anatomy. Human beings are poor sprinters compared with almost any other animal of similar size, and unusually good at covering moderate distances in heat. We have an extraordinary density of sweat glands where other mammals rely on panting, which cannot be done while galloping; a ligament at the back of the neck that stabilises the head while running and is absent in our closest relatives; long, springy tendons in the leg that store and return energy; and the ability to breathe independently of our stride, which four-legged runners cannot do. The suggestion drawn from this is that our ancestors hunted by pursuing animals until the animals overheated. The anatomical evidence is strong; the evidence that anybody actually hunted this way rests on a small number of observed cases and is much weaker.

The health case is better established and more often overstated. Regular aerobic exercise has one of the strongest evidence bases in preventive medicine, with substantial reductions in cardiovascular disease, in several cancers, in type 2 diabetes and in all-cause mortality. But the relationship is not a straight line. Most of the measurable benefit arrives in the first fifteen or twenty minutes of moderate activity a day, and the curve flattens sharply after that; the additional health return on training for a marathon rather than walking briskly is small, and once the injury rate among people training for long distances is counted, it may be negative. Whatever is driving the growth in endurance events, it is not an efficient pursuit of health.

What participants actually say, when surveyed, points elsewhere. The motive reported most often is not fitness but completion: the event is a defined task, with a date, a distance and an unambiguous outcome, and very little else in a modern life supplies that combination. Work is continuous, rarely finished and seldom measured in a way the person doing it finds meaningful. A race is finite. It has a result. Nobody can dispute whether you finished it, and the training that precedes it converts an abstract intention into a schedule of small, verifiable acts.

Dolores Achebe, who studies leisure and work, regards this as the beginning of the explanation rather than the end of it, and draws an uncomfortable conclusion from it. If people are running because their work provides no completion, no measurable result and no control over their own time, then the marathon is an individual solution to a collective problem. It fixes nothing about the work. It supplies the feeling of agency without the thing itself, and an entire industry of entry fees, equipment, coaching applications and branded clothing has grown up to sell that feeling back to the people who are missing it.

As a diagnosis this seems to me largely right, and as a prescription it is of very little use, since nobody proposing to reorganise the labour market can offer anything to somebody who wants to go for a run on Saturday. There is also a counter-example inside the phenomenon. The part of it that has grown fastest is the free weekly event: no entry fee, no sponsor's arch, no medal, no commercial interest whatever, staffed by the people who ran it last week. If the activity were principally a product being sold, that is not the part one would expect to be expanding most quickly.

What remains genuinely interesting is the shape of the thing. Human beings are usually described as avoiding effort and seeking comfort, and a great deal of economics assumes it. Here are several million of them voluntarily undertaking something difficult, repeatedly, at their own expense, for no external reward, and reporting afterwards that it was among the better decisions they have made. Whatever account of motivation one prefers, it has to accommodate that, and most accounts do not.