Haydn Shaughnessy took a holiday but not the kind where you put your feet up and sip a cocktail by the pool
On the path leading to my room lay the scattered mauve and pink petals of a bougainvillea plant. Instinct told me that here was a sign and that to step on the delicate silk-like petals would bring bad luck, so, gingerly, I skipped over them into the open door-well that lay beyond and simultaneously into a short week of unnerving promise that lay somewhere off the scale of normal expectations.
The brochure that brought me to the Monte-Serra on the Portuguese Algarve showed younger people, agile, golden from the sun, evidently healthy within. I am pressing 50 and am inhabited by that garrulous resentment that indicates time has passed too quickly, too many days were spent on other people's needs, I'm overweight and the challenges that give younger people their vibrancy belong to yesterday.
But I was told age does not matter. Nor do size and weight. There is a promise we can make to ourselves and that is: all of us can go beyond our limits.
The hosts at Monte-Serra were up for helping me to go beyond mine. I had no idea they meant to achieve this by a mini-triathlon and that I would bike, swim and run it in just three days' time.
The Monte-Serra is a series of ridges and minor peaks that, for the past 18 months, has been unusually scorched by the sun. The southern European drought has left them at the mercy of spontaneous combustion. Even areas that have escaped the worst forest fires exhibit blackened peeling barks.
The first rule of Wild Fitness, a concept developed by a young Kenyan company that now offers fitness holidays in Europe, is that our bodies belong outdoors among the chaos with which nature surrounds us, exposed to risks that nature intended us to endure.
When we sprint it should be on the runnels and undulations of the tracks that lead through the scorched forest, rather than on a treadmill in the gym; when we swim we should paddle out through the muddy bank of a lake, rather than take a footbath and then ease our way into a heated pool. If it is to be transport by bike, then let's do it where it counts, in the mountains.
"Imagine," says Tara Wood, who organises and owns Wild Fitness, "if you took an animal from the wild tomorrow and put it into an apartment in New York in front of the television, or if you put it in an office all day in London [ or Dublin I was tempted to add] and fed it junk food and coffee and alcohol. What do you think would happen to it? It would be depressed, and lose its agility and power. It would lose its will. It would begin to suffer in no time."
That, she contends, is part of what has happened to us. One part of our ills, she claims, stems very simply from the sense of order that we have constructed for ourselves.
The limitations of our ordered world affect our psychological wellbeing and our posture and our physical capabilities but also they constrain our sense of what we are physically capable of doing.
Well, bring it on Tara, I was thinking. I can run two and a half miles.
The sky remains blue for most of the day on the Algarve, beginning with the 6.30 sunrise.
I know that the sun rises at 6.30 because, except when jumping into the car stressed by the thought of missing an early flight to London or Amsterdam, 6.30 is the earliest I have ever volunteered to rise from my bed, especially on holiday.
On the morning after taking the first superstitious step into that room, I walked to a makeshift dojo for a 7am circuit training session, Wild Fitness style, built around the fight side of our fight-flight instincts.
After a breakfast that would be healthy by the standards many set for themselves (bearing in mind my own views on food are to the left of cranky), I did the best part of an hour on the Swiss ball, crunching the abs, pushing up, rotating left and right. But, more interesting than these power moves, we also balanced. I knelt on a ball that wanted to extricate itself from my grip.
"The body needs to be challenged," Reza, the instructor, told us, as the muscles of my left thigh toyed with the idea of seizing. "The machines in your gym do not challenge your body. Your body adapts to your gym routines and spares itself."
Being able to stand on the Swiss ball is the ultimate challenge for the Wild Fitness gurus. Everything else simply leads up to achieving perfect balance.
"On the surfaces that we normally walk, the body doesn't need to concern itself with unpredictability," says Tara, "so it slumps. Our shoulders go round and we go out on shape. In the wild, the body needs awareness and it becomes more intelligent and takes options that are good for it."
After lunch and a siesta, I went back to the dojo for boxing practice, incorporating the primal movements that are natural and essential to our bodies. Crouching under a left from Reza, twisting to swing a left hook, throwing the straight right.
The best I can say of it, and I enjoyed it more than any sport I've done in the past decade, is that I got the chance to hit him. Of course he wore pads and that made it legal but I still savour that moment.
The mini-triathlon was upon us quickly: an eight-and-a-half kilometres bike ride through steep mountain roads and track descents, a 700m swim in a lake bordered by high barren hills, and finally a three kilometre run on the terraced hills that retained all that water.
As well as the fitness training that preceded it, the gang at Wild Fitness gave talks on nutrition, posture and the psychology of fitness. I was taught how to train rather than how to create safe routines that my body would adapt to; how to train for better posture; and what to eat . . . Well, on the last point I would not give them full marks but as for the first point the proof would be there on the finishing line.
Tara Wood's basic point is we no longer realise what we are capable of because we are so constrained by our worries and the limitations of our ordered and stressed lives.
There may be important lessons we can learn about our ability to live fuller, healthier lives by rising to challenges that seem daunting.
I completed the mini-triathlon. From the first hill of the bike-ride onwards, I was distressed by the refusal of the bike to glide, and after the draining climbs the last thing I wanted to do was swim 700m. Climbing from the lake, the steep ascent to the run almost made me weep, and by the end of the run I was exhausted and yet barely able to contain the feeling that life cheats us of an essential freedom, but that for a few days I had broken out.
Some of what I did that day I should do every day.