Ex-military man offers boot camp for blokes

Retiree John Talbot has launched a men’s fitness class, tapping into skills he learned in the forces. He tells Helen Vause about his days in uniform and the need for men to look after themselves.

On Monday mornings, John Talbot can sometimes be seen jogging along Calliope Rd with a couple of companions, recruits to his new ‘Boot Camp for Blokes’ exercise class at the Devonport Community House.

Seventy-two-year-old fitness instructor Talbot is on a mission to find many more blokes to join him at the class he started recently in a bid to get local men more active about their own health and fitness.

So far, it has been a rather slow start increasing numbers at the Boot Camp class. But he’s in it for the long haul, he says, hoping his regulars will help attract others by their example.

Talbot has spent a lifetime in sport and fitness training.

Now in retirement, he says men in his age group are lagging well behind their female counterparts in working on their health and fitness.

“I only know a handful of men my age who are exercising. Too many are just letting themselves go.”

Talbot walks a morning circuit of at least 10km around Devonport.

Along the way, he says he meets the same groups and pairs of women out walking, but very few men.

Talbot hatched his Boot Camp plan after he moved back to Devonport with his wife Marilyn last year.

It was on a ferry trip to Devonport, he remembers, that he suddenly decided he belonged back in the place he’d been raised. And looking for things to do in retirement, he found his way to the Devonport Community House, where he joined the volunteers there.

At first, he became one of the drivers who pick up local seniors for a weekly session at the library or a shopping trip to the supermarket.

But his background in fitness training made him the right man in the right place at the right time for the Community House to launch a fitness class for men.

While local women of all ages come and go for different exercise groups on the house timetable, few men attended those groups. The idea of a group, unashamedly just for men, was born.

In late autumn, posters for the Boot Camp went up all over the village, offering a 45-minute class to build flexibility, strength and endurance.

At $5 a class, cost can’t be too much of a barrier.

But with just two regulars since Talbot started the class in April, recruiting local men to the group is proving challenging.

“I’ve talked to plenty of guys I know around here. They’re just lazy,” chuckles Talbot. “But we’ll build this group up slowly.”

He credits his father, Reg Talbot, with guiding the direction his life took and the development of his physical and outdoor skills.

“I was lucky enough to have just the best dad. He was the best father a boy could ever hope for,” he says.

John Talbot played in junior rugby league and soccer teams, but as secondary school loomed, his father suggested switching to rugby.

He spent three seasons in Takapuna Grammar’s 1st XV. “It was all about sport for me.

Rugby, cricket, swimming and athletics.”

Next up his father pointed the high-energy young man in the direction of the army. “Dad thought it would be the right place for me at that time in my life. And once again, he was right.” sources around them, and found food.

As a recruit at the Waiouru Military Camp, Talbot loved the hurly-burly and challenges of army life.

“Possums are good eating and they were all around,” says Talbot, who goes on to describe a rudimentary trap with a rope that would somehow snare the leg of a passing possum. No trouble from there, says Talbot, to skin, gut and quarter the catch for the pot. As he recalls it, every hungry man got his hot feed of possum.

After a couple of days with Talbot in the bush, he hopes they’d learned plenty about survival in the wild.

Later, with a focus on survival techniques in a very different environment, he found himself with the late Sir Edmund Hillary in an Air Force Iroquois helicopter landing on the unwelcoming slopes of Mt Cook.

The two would spend a couple of days together in “brutal” weather, during which time the conqueror of Everest taught his eager companion about alpine survival and how to build a snow cave – lessons Talbot later passed on to military air crew.

“He had much to teach me,” Talbot recalls. “But he was a man of very, very few words, and it was an amazing experience. He said so little though, it felt like being on my own.”

When it was mooted that Wellington would be the next base for his career journey, Talbot decided his 14 years in the armed forces had come to an end.

He saw and grabbed the chance to become a physical-education instructor, and switched forces, with the prospect of more advancement, to join the Air Force.

In his early 20s, he progressed into what he recalls as the most exciting role of his career. With New Zealand troops active in the Vietnam War, he became responsible for working with air crew on survival training, escape and evasion, and unarmed combat.

The New Zealand terrain is similar to that of Vietnam, says Talbot. He mocked up an exercise in which men were dropped into the bush and left them to cope with limited resources.

His eyes light up at the memory of 50 years ago – dropping out of an Iroquois helicopter with a handful of eager air crew into the waters off Great Barrier Island, then swimming ashore into the cover of dense bush. They built shelters from the bush re-

Back on civvy street, he went first into sports publishing and later into working in recruitment all over the world.

Now fit and energetic and loving retirement in his recently rediscovered home town, he wants to take others with him on the path to maintaining great health.

“It’s well known that women invest more in taking better care of themselves. And even if by retirement age men feel they’ve reached a good level of fitness, maintaining that is the important thing.

“I know getting men to keep fit at this age is a problem everywhere. There seem to be a lot of reasons why they are slower to get out walking and get to the classes like their wives are doing.

“Some of it is just apathy. But I want to reach them in this community and help them get going. It will just take time but I think it will happen.”