Gordon Ramsay, 55, was stunned to learn that he has arthritis in his knees
I had to look through our archives to see if I had ever confessed the fact that I’m attracted to Gordon Ramsay, and look – I totally made that confession in 2018. I know I have a problem! I don’t even watch Gordon Ramsay’s shows and I don’t really follow him as a celebrity in general, but whenever I do think about him, I think to myself “Yeah, I would.” You know he’s dirty in a good way. While I knew before now that Ramsay is overly concerned about his weight, I didn’t know that he loves to train for Ironman competitions. He’s obsessed with fitness and keeping weight off and perhaps it’s his stress reliever too. Well, anyway, this 55 year old man is shocked to learn that he has arthritis in his knees and he can’t do Ironman training at this point in his life:
He is the super-fit, marathon-running and Ironman-completing chef who previously played football for Rangers. But at the age of 55, Gordon Ramsay is finally slowing down — albeit by accident, not design. The Michelin-starred cook has just had surgery on his knee after falling during a training run in London — and has been diagnosed with arthritis. Naturally, he is typically sanguine about the prospect.
“F*** me,” he says. “I’ve just come off two weeks on crutches, as I had meniscus surgery. I did it running up the hill in Richmond Park, bolting up it. It was f***ing painful. And when I got the X-rays back, the doctor said, ‘You’ve got arthritis in your knee’. I’d never heard that word in relation to me before. He told me I needed to start slowing down. It was a case of ‘Imagine you’ve got 1.5million steps to run over the next 30 years...pace yourself’. He showed me pictures, and you just don’t want to hear you’ve got arthritis in your knee. I told my mum, though, and she told me to stop being so stupid and to just get on with it. So that was nice.
“I’m a workaholic and training is my release. When lockdown struck I didn’t want to sit there, put weight on and veg out, getting angry with the Government or the Chinese. I also have that stern warning of my father dying at 53 (from a heart attack) and I look at my kids and know I can’t leave them rudderless. I am slightly scared of stopping but do know I will have to slow down at some stage.”
Good luck to any medical team trying to hold Gordon back. Currently he trains for up to two hours a day, in addition to a gruelling 12 hours of work. For fun he knocks out Ironman events — each one a 26.2-mile run, 2.4-mile swim and 112-mile bike ride — and uses Zwift, an indoor bike system favoured by professional cyclists, to the point of exhaustion.
“When lockdown struck I didn’t want to sit there, put weight on and veg out, getting angry with the Government or the Chinese…” What? Did people really just sit at home and think about how angry they were at China? I mean, I knew Donald Trump felt that way, but Gordon Ramsay? Gross. As for everything he says about his training and his knees… if you follow me on Twitter, you probably know that I also had a weird slide in some mud while I was walking/hiking over the weekend. My leg hurt like hell for two days but I managed to stay off of it. While I have never trained at Ironman-level, being unable to walk or hike for a few days really messes me up physically and psychologically, so in a narrow way, I do feel for Ramsay. Being on crutches for two weeks for someone used to being very active every day is just rough. But the arthritis stuff… like, a lot of people have arthritis? Many 50-somethings have arthritis in their bodies somewhere, their knees or their hands or their back. The fact that it never even occurred to Gordon Ramsay is kind of funny.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
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