Last year, when Peter Johnston turned 50, he had a life crisis. The Stockport native had a successful career as an IT consultant, a loving wife, two young daughters, and plenty of friends to go to the pub with most evenings. But on his 50th birthday, as he went into his bathroom to shave, he remembers not liking what he saw in the mirror.
“I was evidently overweight, pale skin, bumps all over my face – you name it. I didn’t look good at all.” He admits that it’s probably a phase that most men his age tend to go through, a “realisation that you’re now definitely old, and that it’s going to be more difficult to keep up in the same way I used to be able to”. Which scared him, especially because he wanted to be healthy enough to play with his daughters and be a good dad for them as they grow up.
He decided to take up jogging, with the aim of running his first half-marathon before his 51st birthday. He bought new running shoes and gym clothes, and his wife helped him set up a music playlist on his phone. He was all set to go, but he found his runs difficult.
Not because he wasn’t able to endure them, but rather, that listening to music was not right for him. “After a while, I’d get bored – especially when you’re listening to the same tracks again. Don’t get me wrong, I love AC/DC, but there are only so many times I can listen to Shoot to Thrill. Or, when you aren’t feeling a track but you can’t change it without interrupting your run,” he says. “Worse,” he adds, “when you’re in a busier area, like a high street, and you want to change the song, you have to keep jogging, while playing with your phone and making sure you don’t run into anyone. It’s a nightmare.”
A work friend recommended that Johnston change his tune; not to other forms of music, but, rather, to audiobooks – full-length books told through high-quality audio narrations, and presented in formats similar to podcasts. The medium has grown rapidly over the past five years, particularly on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones – and Audible now provides the world’s largest selection of audiobooks.
According to the UK’s Publishers’ Association, around one in 10 Brits are now listening to audiobooks, while spending on the medium has more than doubled in the past five years to a total of £31m. Research commissioned by Audible from University College London earlier this year showed that audiobooks produced a stronger emotional and physiological response compared with visual storytelling mediums such as TV and video streaming, regardless of the genre of content being listened to.
For Johnston, listening to audiobooks has multiple benefits. For starters, he says: “I’m actually reading a lot more.” He started off with Yuval Noah Hari’s Sapiens: A History of Humankind, which Johnston described as one of the “most thought provoking listens” of his life. “When you’re running, and listening to what’s basically the origin of human thought, why we do what we do, it’s pretty amazing,” he says. “I was listening to it while running through the countryside one weekend, and I was so engrossed in it, thinking about what was being said, and how that shaped the world around me; I’d forgotten about my distance completely. I’d run a mile longer without even realising.”
And it’s not just while running that he’s found audiobooks useful. Like millions around the world, he also listens to audiobooks when doing general day-to-day activities such as driving, doing household chores, and even when he’s relaxing in the bath.
His favourites tend to be non-fiction titles, with one recently being Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, which he stumbled on while browsing recommended titles on Audible.
“It’s such a fascinating book,” says Johnston. “And it’s told in a really interesting and engaging way that’s humorous, but also really exciting. I wasn’t really that good at science in school, but I learned more about quantum physics from listening to that book while doing the laundry the other week than I did in four years of studying it at school.”
Johnston will turn 51 in October. Since his birthday, he’s 12kg lighter, leaner, and says he feels “better than I’ve ever done in my life”. And that’s not just in his physical fitness, but, thanks to audiobooks, mentally too.
“I’ve been able to discover all these things that I otherwise wouldn’t have the time to go out looking for,” he says. “I can browse through the library on my phone, or just type in a subject I find interesting one day and voila – I’ll find loads of books I can listen to at the tips of my fingers.”
“Audiobooks aren’t just a way of keeping me entertained while I run miles,” says Johnston. “They’ve given me the opportunity to learn something new every day.”
Your first audiobook is free with a 30-day trial from Audible – £7.99 a month after 30 days. Renews automatically
