He had never taken a supplement in his life. Then he stopped taking this one, twice, and watched what happened.
The scaffold was hired for one month. Not a month and a bit. A month.
Johnnie stood at the bottom of it and did the sums. Fascia boards to put right. The whole outside perimeter of the roof to get through before the builders arrived on dates that were already fixed. And one shoulder he had learned, over the previous year, to be careful with.
"To hit that month deadline was quite a scary prospect at one point," he says.
He is from Yorkshire, brought up on a sheep farm in the Pennines, and he spent the first 40 years of his life in the north of England. The accent came out to New Zealand with him and never left. What also came with him was a habit of mind.
"I love being in the outdoors," he says. "I love science, which is why I enjoy my golf and a lot of the projects that I do at home."
He means that literally. He likes the golf swing for the physics of it, the kinetic energy and the conservation of energy, and he likes a project for the same reason. "Getting out there, getting your hands dirty, getting in the elements, working things out, making the project right." He was an all-rounder at school and never stopped. Kayaking through his 20s, whitewater slalom, good enough at one point to be invited to the British Championships. Tennis. Later, coaching junior football in Rangiora.
The villa is 110 years old and sits on the old Kiwi quarter acre. He and his wife work the garden together all year round, and he calls the maintenance seasonal and relentless, which it is. A 1960 VW Beetle waits in the shed for restoration, with an old Kiwi caravan behind it in the queue. And there is a young granddaughter, who he says is an absolute delight to him.
That is the life he wants to be fit for.
The shoulder that never quite came right
The decades of sport had all pulled in one direction. "In my 20s, I tended to do a lot of shoulder-heavy activities," he says. "The kayaking, tennis, the little bit of golf that I played, it all put stress on my shoulders."
Then, the year before we spoke to him, he pulled a muscle in that shoulder. The muscle itself came right. The joint never quite did.
It did not stop him. It made him careful, which for a man with a shed full of unfinished projects is its own kind of tax. He knew what the old pattern looked like on a long physical day. "I would feel myself slowing down, or thinking I want to stop early today, because joints are getting tired, wrists are just aching a bit."
The knees made themselves known too, mostly getting up off the floor. Which is where the granddaughter is.
"There are times when I'm playing with my granddaughter that I do feel my age," he says. "And I feel like I can't get down on the floor."
He had spent the previous evening in her play tent. Rolling around on the floor with her, he says, is just so precious. "I want to be able to do that long into the future if I can."
Then he says the line that sits underneath all of it. "Saying yes to the granddaughter is really important."
So when the scaffold went up with a month on the clock, more was riding on it than a roof. There was a large volume of work, and as the project got going it escalated. Going into it, he says, it was a bit of a concern.
A sceptic runs his own test
Johnnie is the last person you would sell a supplement to.
"All my life, I have taken very few supplements or tablets, and I'm very sceptical about that sort of thing," he says. Whenever someone told him he should try this or take that, he never did. Not once.
His son gave him a bottle of Koru Joint.
Koru Joint is made in Christchurch, and it does three jobs at once rather than one. Curcumin and boswellia, both antioxidants, soothe the joint and support flexibility. Vitamin C and glucosamine nourish the cartilage. Chondroitin and hyaluronic acid support synovial fluid and smooth movement. Most supplements on the shelf concentrate on one of those jobs.
How the formula works
Soothe
Curcumin and boswellia soothe the joint and support flexibility.
Nourish
Vitamin C and glucosamine nourish the cartilage.
Lubricate
Chondroitin and hyaluronic acid support the synovial fluid that keeps a joint moving smoothly.
Koru Joint is made in Christchurch, New Zealand.
None of which moved him at the time.
"I really wasn't convinced that it was necessarily going to do what I wanted it to do," he says.
He took it anyway, because it was in his hand. The bottle went behind the coffee pot in the kitchen. Two capsules a day is the guidance on the label, and the morning coffee was the cue. "When I get the coffee off the shelf, the Koru's there and it reminds me to take it," he says. "I do it every day without fail."
After a few days he could feel a difference. He refused to credit it.
"It was difficult to put it directly down to the Koru Joint," he says. "I thought maybe it was the exercises that I was doing. Maybe it was a bit of physiotherapy that I had been doing at the time."
That is the honest position. A few days is his experience, not a rule - most people notice changes over weeks rather than days.
So he did what he does with a golf swing. He watched the variables.
On the odd occasion he stopped taking it, he paid attention. "I've noticed a difference in my shoulder that has caused me maybe to be a bit more careful with the things that I do." When he started again: "Things have gone back to normal, and I feel really supported."
Once could be coincidence, and he says that is exactly what he thought the first time. Then it happened again.
"Now it's happened a couple of times, and I'm convinced that the Koru Joint has helped me," he says. "To me, that was scientifically conclusive."
The realisation at the bottom of the ladder
Which brings us back to the scaffold.
He was up and down those ladders all day, every day of that month, working around the builders and having everything ready for the trades before they arrived.
"With the support of Koru Joint, it gives me the confidence to be able to just get up there and get into it," he says.
And somewhere in the middle of it, the thing he had been bracing for did not arrive.
"No problem at all. I kept going all day. I must have got the step count up beyond anything I've ever done before, almost. There was a realisation there that my body was keeping up."
Three-quarters of the way through the job, he had hit every deadline he needed to.
"I'm fitter than I thought I was," he says.
It was not only the shoulder by then. "The rest of me feels great. My knees, my ankles, my feet, my fitness, my hips."
The quieter wins are the ones he lists without being asked. The annual pruning of the fruit trees, done on time, because in a garden you cannot take a year off. And the floor of a play tent, which he gets down onto and back up from.
Without it, he does not have to imagine. He ran that test twice. It looks like a shoulder that makes him careful again. It looks like standing at the bottom of a ladder doing the maths on how much of the day he has in him. It looks like watching the play tent from a chair, which is not the grandad he intends to be.
He talks about it now, which is the part that would have amused him a few years ago.
"I have recommended Koru Joint to friends," he says. "I'm constantly telling my friends about it because I'm just convinced of what it's done for me."
The natural ingredients were never a deal-breaker for him one way or the other. He mentions it anyway. "The fact that it is natural is comforting to know."
And the man who spent a lifetime saying no to the tablet someone was holding out has a word for himself now.
"I'm a convert," he says. "The power of nutritional supplements."
The scaffold was still up when we spoke to him, with the last quarter of the job to go. He was going up and down that ladder all day, and the sums no longer worried him.
- Sponsored by Koru Nutrition
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Where to get Koru Joint
One capsule, three jobs. Curcumin and boswellia soothe the joint and support flexibility, vitamin C and glucosamine nourish the cartilage, and chondroitin and hyaluronic acid support the synovial fluid that keeps a joint moving smoothly.
In Koru Nutrition's 60-day customer trial, 7 in 10 people felt real improvement within 30 days. And because capsules like these do not announce themselves overnight, every order carries a 60-day money-back guarantee.
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