From the 47-year-old runner who needs a double hip replacement to the 27-year-old CrossFitter with a ruptured ACL, those who push their bodies too hard often regret it. What are the lessons for the rest of us?

Jonathan Price has always been active and exercise-focused. Growing up in south Wales, rugby was his first love. Through school, university and beyond, he also surfed, rowed, played squash and ran competitively – on track, in 10k races and cross-country. Career and family demands meant that much of this fell away in later years, but the running stuck. He found time for marathons, half marathons – “I’d run a half marathon every weekend just for fun,” he says – and, through the working week, regular 30- or 40-minute runs to manage stress and clear his head. “I travel a lot for work,” says Price, now 50, a company CEO. “With running, all you need is a pair of running shoes and you can do it anywhere.”

By his mid-40s, though, Price’s body was beginning to object. He wasn’t recovering so well. “I could run just fine but I’d be in pain for two or three days afterwards,” he says. On top of this, every six months or so, his lower back seemed to seize up completely. A physiotherapist thought it was “tight hip flexors” and pointed Price towards “hip opening” exercises, designed to reduce stiffness and increase range of motion. Someone else prescribed him muscle relaxants, but the pain only deepened, and his range of movement continued to dip. Finally, in the summer of 2023, a chance encounter with a hip surgeon led to the diagnosis of osteoarthritis and, at the end of that year, Price, then 47, had a double hip replacement.

It took a heatwave to get me to shed my shame and my sleeves, but now there’s no stopping me. Life is cooler in every way

‘Aren’t you hot in that?” was the question that plagued my summers as a teenager. I would never bare my arms; instead, I would cover up with a trusty black cardigan. Even T-shirts felt too revealing, too tight on the arm, too clinging to the body. I needed layers to feel comfortable. Well, comfortable isn’t the right word. I was never comfortable, despite telling everyone: “No, I’m not hot. I don’t really feel the heat.”

In my 20s and 30s, I collected a hot-weather capsule wardrobe of T-shirt dresses in various sizes, all baggy and sleeved. But why? I’m someone who should know better. I’ve read the books, I’ve shared the memes. I know, from body-positivity activists, that you don’t have to deny yourself the joy of being at the beach or pool just because a magazine tells you you have to get yourself “beach-body ready”: slimmer, hairless, perfect.

At last! It’s time for our invertebrate of the year competition as voted for by you. Today, the common woodlouse – come back on Tuesday to find out who else made the top 10

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The new film extols the value of a rules-based world order. That’s far more radical than any casting decision

• Peter Swallow is Labour MP for Bracknell, and the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on classics. Before his election, he was a classics teacher and academic

For years, a small but vocal corner of the extremely online right has looked to the ancient world to justify its polluted brand of politics. The classicist Donna Zuckerberg (sister of Facebook founder Mark) wrote a book about it way back in 2018 called Not All Dead White Men – a deep dive into the corners of the internet where misogynists pretend ancient philosophy can justify their hatred of minorities.

You would think that these self-appointed guardians of the ancient world would be excited about a blockbuster retelling one of its greatest pieces of literature, the Odyssey. Especially when Christopher Nolan’s film has been getting rave reviews, “the vast majority … written by men”, as the Guardian’s Catherine Shoard has pointed out. The Odyssey is an action-packed thriller with a fight scene every five seconds. In many ways (and I don’t mean this as a criticism of Nolan; I loved the film for all its flaws), it’s a movie designed to appeal to their tastes. And yet.

Peter Swallow is Labour MP for Bracknell, and the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on classics. Before his election, he was a classics teacher and academic

Three decades after he channelled his heroin addiction into the cult classic Trainspotting, the Scottish author has discovered the joys of yoga, breathwork and standing desks. But is he quite as ‘Zen’ as he claims?

By rights, Irvine Welsh ought to be photographed somewhere gritty, looking grumpy, he says: “That’s the brand.” Beside a graffitied wall or at the docks, with a beanie pulled low, and definitely not smiling. But here he is, clear-skinned and wholesome in shorts and a T-shirt, drinking tea and – it’s hard to think of anything more off-brand – talking about the health benefits of yoga. Given his reputation for having lived in the worlds his books portray, he should or could look a lot worse. He guffaws at this, eyes a delighted blue, and repeats the phrase as if he’s found a new personal tagline: “Could look a lot worse!”

Over the three decades since his cult debut, Trainspotting, was published in 1993, Welsh’s fiction has explored with humour the darker side of life. Drugs, clubs, alcohol, violence … often alongside psychological or social deprivation. Despite being 17 novels and four short-story collections into his career, selling more than 6m books globally, he remains best known for his first. It achieved, he says, “what most writers want to achieve in a lifetime – the big zeitgeist book that goes into the culture”.

It has 12 movements, 200 musicians and aims to unite America. The great US trumpeter and composer talks about his All Rise symphony, his jazz great mentors – and learning humility from his wife

At Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh, Wynton Marsalis is hard to spot. When he first played this venue, in 1984, he was the prodigious 22-year-old soloist out front, blowing Haydn’s trumpet concerto under the baton of Lorin Maazel. Tonight he is embedded in the machinery: half-hidden behind ranks of strings and woodwind, a black-suited figure in the heart of his own symphony.

It’s a strange way for a composer to behave – especially one whose public persona has long been associated with certainty, polemic and the upright authority of a man who can make any argument sound like a moral law. Yet Marsalis seems almost pleased by his disappearance. “It’s my piece,” he says, as we talk in his hotel room the next morning, “but it’s not my show.”

Admission may undermine Farage’s account of circumstances surrounding £5m gift from crypto billionaire

• UK politics live – latest updates

Nigel Farage has admitted he held talks about the possibility of returning as Reform UK’s leader months before the 2024 general election, potentially undermining his own account of the circumstances in which he received a £5m gift from a crypto billionaire.

It was reported at the weekend Farage had struck a deal with the party’s then leader, Richard Tice, and the convicted fraudster George Cottrell to return to frontline politics.

Party’s deputy leader says on social media the case is related to a complaint by an anti-Israel lobby group

UK politics live – latest updates

Reform UK’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, is under investigation by parliament’s standards watchdog over a possible failure to declare an interest.

The watchdog did not provide details of the allegation aside from ⁠saying the case was opened on 28 July and would be conducted by the parliamentary commissioner for standards, Daniel ⁠Greenberg.

Tributes paid to ‘brilliant, provocative and immensely talented’ journalist, who died after short illness

The Sunday Times and Sun columnist Rod Liddle has died aged 66 after a short illness, News UK said.

He died at the James Cook University hospital in Middlesbrough on Sunday evening.

Explosives used to move a large rock and let more water flow to cool nuclear power plant

More must be done ⁠to strengthen the European Union’s borders at critical points, ⁠European Commission president ⁠Ursula ​von der Leyen told Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez ⁠in a letter.

In the carefully-calibrated letter, first reported by Reuters and a number of Spanish media, von der Leyen was quoted as congratulating Spain for swiftly handling the incident and “successfully preventing” the onward migration to mainland Spain and the EU.