In the autumn of 2019, a few weeks after his 60th birthday, Simon Lord began his new career as a personal trainer with a session in his local park in the Oxfordshire village of Cholsey. He had known that this was the job for him as soon as he opened the first page of his coursework.
The following year, just before the UK first went into lockdown, he extended the garage of the home where he lives with his wife, Sarah, and fitted it out with secondhand gym equipment. He now has 15 clients and delivers two group classes a week. All this he fits around his part-time job as a team leader at Tesco.
“I’m a late developer,” he says, meaning that over the past decade he has studied for qualifications as a fitness instructor, then as a personal trainer, and finally to specialise in rehabilitation after cancer. On the other hand, he adds: “I’ve actually seen something through.”
As a child at school, and then as a young adult looking for a career, Lord had found it hard to settle. “Didn’t do very well at school because I couldn’t sit still,” he says. Afterwards, “I was a…
