Debut

As we head into our sec­ond Lock­down, OVERDUE debuts its new series, doc­u­ment­ing people’s pos­i­tive Lock­down expe­ri­ences and see­ing how these indi­vid­u­als have made the best of a chal­leng­ing sit­u­a­tion.

Words Miran­da Wilkin­son

Rod Buchanan is orig­i­nal­ly from Glas­gow.  He trained in NYC as a pro­fes­sion­al dancer, worked in the West End and toured glob­al­ly with pop­stars such a Kylie Minogue.  Rod retired from danc­ing after suf­fer­ing a brain tumour and devel­oped a pas­sion for Barre fit­ness.  Dur­ing Lock­down he began online work­outs via Insta­gram and Zoom which had an unex­pect­ed uplift­ing effect. 

“When COVID hit I was either in denial or like many, didn’t know the seri­ous­ness of it.  I remem­ber say­ing to my team, give this 6 weeks and we’ll be back to nor­mal. It only took a week to see that in fact, things were going from bad to worse. 

I felt myself get­ting into bad habits, from get­ting up to eat break­fast and still being on the sofa hours lat­er stuck in a news cycle.

I had already been liv­ing some sort of iso­la­tion as I was still in recov­ery from a hip replace­ment that I had at the begin­ning of Feb.  I should have been due to start back to work 2 weeks after lock­down but I had a sud­den awak­en­ing: I live alone, I’m sin­gle, I’ve recent­ly had a hip replace­ment, I’ve lost my sense of taste and smell so pre­sum­ably I had a mild case of COVID BUT I’m way bet­ter off than many oth­ers, who are either los­ing loved ones, suf­fer­ing bad­ly from COVID, or find­ing them­selves in tough depress­ing sit­u­a­tions.

My ‘go-to’ on my tough­est days is to remem­ber 10 years ago I sur­vived a brain tumour; it very quick­ly puts every­thing into per­spec­tive.

This pan­dem­ic brought human­i­ty to the fore­front, we, the whole world was all feel­ing the effects from it, we all missed loved ones, we all at some point felt alone.

The sci­ence is there that exer­cise plays a huge impact on people’s well-being and men­tal sta­bil­i­ty.  I need­ed exer­cise for my own hip rehab and for my own men­tal health, so I turned to IGTV.

The day I switched my phone on to deliv­er a work­out, was the day I opened my liv­ing room but sur­pris­ing­ly I opened my heart. I saw my fol­low­er num­bers grow and I didn’t feel so alone any­more.”

Web­site bodbyrod.com
Insta­gram @bodbyrodpt