365 days watching me decay

A year ago, you got on a train to Guildford and sat on the steps outside a pub, with a ginger girl you’d matched with two weeks earlier on Tinder. You didn’t know then that I was mad. Would you take it back now? Go north to London after work that night instead of south to me?

I broke the rules of dating-in-2017 and spoke to you first. We’d matched somewhere before; hardly anybody seems new on apps these days. We talked about High Fidelity and Springsteen and The Graduate, and two weeks later we were sat on the ground, finalising our top 10 songs of all time. That first time I heard your Sheffield accent, it was broader than it is now. I suppose that must be a trick of memory, or maybe I’ve just become more accustomed to it since your vowels have corrupted mine. You kissed me on the way to get dinner, we drank whisky until the pub closed, and that was it, the last first date.

I liked dating, generally. I can do first dates. I’m the tiniest bit too loud, too fast, too drunk, too manic, too eager to appear fun, compensating for everything inside, but I can survive them without too much anxiety. I was that way with you, unrestrained and unapologetic. I don’t remember when or how I first told you I was unwell. There were allusions in those early days, passing comments where I was breezy and made out it was no big deal. We never had A Talk because I didn’t want to give it weight. I love those first days of not being this girl, pretending I can keep living that life. I don’t know when you first realised what you had taken on.

Maybe it was 2nd June. I know the date of the first meltdown. Why is it this the anniversary I’ve committed to memory? I had to look up the day we matched, check a calendar for our first date, plot the days and weeks for the dates that followed and the first night I abandoned my car in a multistory in Surrey to stay with you in London. 2nd June, instant recall. I don’t know what triggered the panic attacks but sat in a Camden pub on a Friday night, I was too quiet. You hadn’t learnt yet how many meanings could be translated from quiet. You would become fluent in time. Now you know that quiet means peace, that quiet means contentment, but that quiet is the eye of a storm, that in quiet I’m waiting to implode and disappear into myself.

That night on the northern line, I crumbled away in front of you somewhere near Warren Street. It was the first time I ran from you, back up to the surface and you followed at a distance as I stalked around unfamiliar streets unsure what to do next, unable to breathe. I knew that night you would leave me. Of course you would. Not even two months in and you were witnessing the full extent of my irrational panic for the first time. A terrified girl you barely knew, running through the city in the dark. It took us three different tubes down one stretch of track to make it back to south London. The following morning I asked resignedly if that was it, if we were done. You laughed and said of course not, that these things happen. Oh god, these things would happen.

Six weeks later, I decided I loved you in a cinema in Wandsworth. You were about to walk across the Lake District and I’d dutifully accompanied you to buy supplies. A friend phoned to advise you on walking shoes and you said “I’m just with Alix. My girlfriend. You haven’t met her yet.” It was the first time I’d heard you say to someone else that I was your girlfriend, and while we watched Planet of the Apes (your pick, I presume), I watched you. I’d never seen somebody able to lounge and twist so much in a cinema seat, like a monkey yourself, and the whole way through, you didn’t let go of me. You never broke contact. How could I not love you? A girl so terrified of being left, with a boy who couldn’t seem to let go.

There have been so many days where I’ve cried and told you to go, desperately wanting you to stay. I always want you to stay; it’s just easier to think this will end on my terms. Only love can break your heart, as Neil Young sings. Sometimes I need the space to breathe, sometimes I need you to hold me tighter to you, and so you make your guess. We don’t have a failsafe answer and even you for my love, I don’t have enough words to explain what is happening to me and what you should do. Some days I fear it’s an impossible test that neither of us can pass and I despise myself for setting it.

We settled into a routine over summer, and life could have become easy, so I left my job. I came back to law and to working in London, things I’d swore I would never do again. I got worn down by the commute and moved here. I knew I was coming back. Not from the moment we met, but from far earlier than was practical. On the day that I moved, I closed the front door behind me and within 30 minutes the phone rang. Ripley was gone. I immediately got darker. That night was the opposite of my first-date-self with everything you don’t want me to be at its most heightened state. In the weeks after her funeral, I would lie awake until the early hours, sobbing until I was exhausted and telling you I couldn’t go on, I couldn’t, I wouldn’t. How could there be any point in a world where cancer will rob a two-year-old of the years ahead. You offered to come to the funeral, or to therapy with me if I needed; was that a thing we could do you asked?

My mental health diagnosis shifted, both our careers got tougher, we struggled on. We kept working towards arbitrary dates, time after time when things would notionally be better. Every time we arrived, a new set of challenges meant the world fell away from under me. It’s always me that falters. In the toughest moments, I repeatedly told you to go. You’ve had long dark conversations with a girl who is not quite me, a shadow version of myself, and I’ve watched her try to tear us apart like an out of body experience. The next morning you’ve had the rational version of the same conversations with me. You’ve repeatedly told me you’re staying.

A whistlestop tour of how my broken brain has affected us reads as a calamity, but there have been far more days where you’ve been in a relationship with me than days where the relationship is with my illness. We’ve gone on road trips and sung Thunder Road. We’ve taken ridiculous photos with alpacas. I’ve twirled around on the Southbank under the lights and scrambled down onto the shore in the dark with you. You took me to Bristol in the snow and walked for miles in a city where everything had stopped. We’ve stayed up until the early hours with one earphone each, challenging each other to the next line of Dylan lyrics; Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts the impossible challenge. We’ve watched the sunset over the Lidl, which you assure me is the finest view in all of south London. You have made me laugh and laugh and laugh until I’m in pain. I have a hundred other moments I could recount where I have been amazed at the depth of my love for you. But there are dark parts of my mind that are an unwanted third party and a shadow, an ex, a mistress, a threat.

You will never understand; my practical, enduring, wonderful Yorkshireman. You worry about things later, always later. To your complete astoundment, I will worry about wild hypotheticals based on hypotheticals. I would claim you’re unemotional but really that’s hugely unfair to you, I’m just effusive and that gap in our styles is frustratingly marked. Every occasion, every card, is an opportunity for me. A declaration. A reminder. A reparation. A compensation, that in giving you so many words on how I feel, it can somehow make up for all the times I have no words and can’t explain at all.

I tried to tell you about kintsugi once, on an early date in the British Museum. How they fixed the cracks with gold lacquer so the repairs became part of the history and the strange beauty of broken things. I wanted you to love a broken thing and now you do. I don’t know where we go next. (Lisbon, soon, is the literal answer). We can’t weather my storm forever. I need to get better but can never “get better”. You have been a wonder, and I love you with all the madness in my soul. One of the Boss’s more romantic lyrics, not like that travesty in Thunder Road. Happy anniversary darling.

What really matters is what you like, not what you are like… Books, records, films — these things matter. Call me shallow but it’s the fuckin’ truth, and by this measure I was having one of the best dates of my life.

High Fidelity (the screenplay, not the book although I have since given you the book and you said you enjoyed it)

Well God knows I’ve failed but He knows that I’ve tried

The blog has been on hold of late. As some of you know, I made some fairly drastic changes to my life this summer. After spending my entire career so far working in law in varying capacities, and a couple of years in London, I finally accepted that I wasn’t happy and that no job, boyfriend or any amount of running was going to fix that. I tried so hard to make it work because I was afraid that leaving law and/or London would mean that I’d failed but neither of those is right for me at present and that’s okay.

I’ve moved to Surrey, about halfway between my life in London and my beloved south coast in Hampshire. I’m only 40 minutes on the train from Waterloo (as opposed to 20 when I lived in Wimbledon, so hardly the ends of the earth!). I have easy access to so many beautiful trails and the North Downs Way is only a few miles from my front door. I’m now the Marketing & Development Manager of a charitable organisation just outside Guildford, only months after questioning why I wasn’t doing just that. It’s tough starting again. I don’t have friends here and there have been a few nights of crying about feeling lonely and worrying that I’ve done the wrong thing but that will settle.

So, to running. I must be doing loads of it, what with my newly found work/life balance and access to beautiful countryside. Actually, no, much like this blog, the running has also been on hold partly because I’ve been questioning my participation in the running community and its effect on me. I recently reread a piece that Gary wrote for Run247 about Strava and whether it influences the hows and whys of our running. Are we upping the distance, the pace, the elevation, because of how it will be perceived on Strava, rather than because that’s what we want or because it’s a sensible approach to our running? It’s called the Hawthorne Effect, in which we modify our behaviour in response to being observed.

Running is supposed to help control my anxiety but of late I’ve found that anxiety is controlling my running. I worry that people are seeing my uploads to Strava and judging me for not running further, for not running more frequently, for not running faster, for how high my heart rate is. That isn’t true of course, it’s a mixture of severe anxiety and a touch of narcissism to think anybody cares. Still, I stroll back from failed runs wondering: what will make me more of a #stravawanker, auto-uploading the 1km run where I cried and didn’t have the heart to carry on, or deleting it and presenting a curated perspective of my running? I’m finding it hard to run well when I’m devoting precious energy to a cycle of self-obsessed worrying.

All of social media gets a bit narcissistic though, doesn’t it? Blogs and tweets eventually morph from ways to engage and share content, to becoming attention-seeking extremes. Perhaps because all runners have a slightly competitive nature whether against each other or themselves. Runs suddenly become brilliant or terrible; there are some who seemingly never experience an average run. “I went for a run today and it was absolutely fine” doesn’t make a story, and if you’re shouting into a void of millions, it’s stories that get picked up. That tiny niggle following a couple of miles becomes DOMS or requires ice and KT tape. The next run is a comeback and is carefully documented as such on Strava, and Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Run, report, repeat.

It’s easy to get addicted to the attention that comes to those stories and so it self-perpetuates which is why we all know people who now can’t get home from a run without uploading 4 posed-but-natural selfies over every channel available. If you don’t share what is essentially the exact same photo of your face, in your living room, every time you run, how will anybody know that you’re a dedicated runner? Even though the photo doesn’t involve the people you ran with, the place you were running or indeed anything else that documents that time/day/run in any way whatsoever. If your run is spent wondering how you’ll present it to the masses on Twitter and Instagram, it becomes less about enjoying running and more about enjoying your own narcissism. Which is fine, you do you, but I don’t particularly want to follow you and don’t pretend that you’re talking about running instead of “look at me! look at me!”

It’s all left me feeling uneasy of late and I’ve had to curate who I follow and who I allow to follow me because the way that some people use social media to talk about running brings out the worst in me. Anxiety leaves me overly introspective. I am prone to catastrophise. I worry a lot. I seek validation and praise (honestly, try working with me, I thrive on praise). Seeing that unhealthy behaviour endorsed in others is not a good example to me and is harming my running and my mental health.

This isn’t to disparage the use of social media or the blog community as a whole. I still think it’s ace and 98% of the people I have met through it, aren’t affected by this post.

Acceptable selfie, because it commemorates a time and place and people. It is not me alone in my living room.

I would never have met two of my absolute favourite girls if it weren’t for Twitter and now Fiona and Jodie are the first people I’ll go to about great runs and terrible runs, about boy problems and career moves, and the day won’t come where I see them and don’t take 20 photos. I love reading Carl’s reasonably new blog because it’s so refreshing to read something so measured and to see enduring positivity when faced with injuries. I haven’t seen my friend Owen in person since the year after university, but when I was first contemplating leaving London, it was envying the photos he takes while running on the South Downs and the south coast that really started to sway me. I could go on and on with recommendations of great accounts to follow. I adore every one of you who checks up on me to see how my new life is going, how injuries have healed and how races went. I still want to see every single photo of every medal you all get, all the beautiful views you see on your runs (preferably location tagged!), and your gloriously sweaty faces beaming in delight on trails and by landmarks. I’m just bored of people who use running as a way to indulge their need for attention and who tenuously connect unrelated content in order to tap into the running community.

When I moved house I read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying which encourages you to discard items that don’t “spark joy” and I’m trying to apply that approach to running and how I talk about it. From here on, I want to post more photos that spark joy in my followers (so expect a lot more views of the Surrey Hills). I want to write content that people enjoy, although I accept that this blog is partially about mental health and isn’t always easy to enjoy. On those days, I hope it’s helping someone. And I want to be honest with what I say, no more catastrophizing, or exaggerating. So to end, this week I went for a run and it was absolutely fine.

(N.B. If you’re seething because you think this post is about you, then it probably is. I make no apology for that; if you decide that a post about narcissism is about you then you’ve proven my point with delicious irony.)

 

Parklife (part deux), or; Now I’m ready to start

Do you remember the time I achieved some limited blog notoriety by writing about how parkrun was a great initiative for mental health? I had already been planning a follow up, and then Stoke Gifford Parish Council ignorantly decided they should charge for Little Stoke parkrun. Twitter is abuzz and the running community is quite rightly outraged.

Let us forget for a moment, that parkrun manages to successfully organise 850 events, across 12 countries without a single one charging anything. Actually, no. Let’s remember that. 850 parkruns. 12 countries. 932,917 runners. Truly staggering statistics and nobody pays to participate. Yet Stoke Gifford Parish Council say it is “unfair” to expect non-running residents to pay for path maintenance. There has been discussion about how fair this is – whether the park is already being subsidised by council tax, whether the runners are (not) so local that it’s (not) their taxes contributing etc. Ultimately, that’s not how tax works. Whilst I love to believe my taxes solely fund libraries, I suspect large amounts of it goes towards all sorts of unsavoury things I dislike and have no need for.

So let us turn our attention to a more pertinent issue, the rather dodgy accounting skills and lack of common sense of Stoke Gifford Parish Council. Little Stoke Parkrun has been running (no pun intended) for over 3 years and given the parish council’s position, you would expect that a lot of maintenance must have occurred in that time. Here is Stoke Gifford Parish Council’s expenditure for the FY2015/16. This is public information, freely available on their website; you can easily find it for yourself by visiting their homepage. Go nose through the month-by-month itemised account of the parish council’s expenditure. No really, go ahead. I’ll wait, I’m not even really here. Take your time.

Back? Stoke Gifford Parish Council initially proposed that each adult runner pay £1. I can’t find details of the proposal but if anyone has a link, please drop it in the comments or let me know on Twitter, and I’ll update this. The BBC article says that there are “about 300” runners at Little Stoke parkrun each weekend. If the council planned to charge 300 runners, £1/week, that would amount to a grand total of £15,600 each year in the parish council coffers. Let’s be benevolent and say half those runners are at junior parkrun on Sunday and exempt from the charge on account of being 6 years old. That’s still a total of £7,800. How much did Stoke Gifford Parish Council spend on “path maintenance” at Little Stoke in FY2015/6? £0. Nothing at all. Presumably thousands of pounds of damage is being done to the paths to justify this course of action and yet the parish council have spent nothing. I will leave you to draw your own conclusions and return to why I originally planned this follow-up.

—

Not long after my original post, I ended up talking to Mind about their Get Set to Go campaign, focusing on the (perceived) barriers that those experiencing mental illness may feel prevent them from taking part in activity. They were already speaking to a number of runners but read the parkrun blog and asked how I would feel about them coming to film me running one Saturday morning and taking part in a short interview.

I messaged Mike, the event director at Southwark parkrun who partially prompted me to write that first post and is an all-round good egg, as the whole team at Southwark are. He liaised at length with both the team at Mind and with parkrun HQ to get the approval we needed. This wasn’t a straightforward task and I’m immensely grateful to all at Southwark who have been so very supportive of me and this blog.

Southwark. ❤ (Photo credit to whoever I nabbed this from!!)

On a chilly, grey March morning, I was the tailrunner at Southwark parkrun. I caught up with a few people, had a delightful leisurely run (after too much tequila the night before) and met the lovely Louise Jones at her first ever parkrun (she is now a convert) who was also filming, about her experience of the Couch to 5k app. Filming the run was surprisingly fun with a member of the Mind team repeatedly whizzing past me on roller blades. Filming the interview was less so because an awful lot of helicopters fly over SE London which meant standing about waiting for noise levels to drop every few minutes.

You can watch the finished product below, or on the Get Set to Go mini-site. I am assured, unprompted, by friends that the camera has added at least 10lbs and that I don’t actually sound like that in real life. I haven’t actually watched it the final version as yet because ironically I think it may bring on a bout of anxiety and self-loathing.

It’s truly sad that Stoke Gifford Parish Council feel they can put a price on the life-changing effects that parkrun can have on their community. I’m proud of the stance that parkrun have taken and sorry for all those at Little Stoke who have lost their parkrun home. I’m sure they will find a new home soon enough and they will all remain a much-loved part of the greater parkrun family regardless.

 

It is the hollow month of March now sweeping in

March is sweeping out, actually. But I don’t write the lyrics, I just pilfer them for blog titles. When I wrote my round up of February, I ended by saying it would be a big month. It was, but in ways I never expected.

I started the month by turning 27 on the 2nd. Birthdays are ace; I don’t usually like mine much but this year I was truly happy and calm on it for the first time in a few years. The problem with birthdays is that there’s a lot of eat/drink/be merry which doesn’t leave much time for running. Ho hum, I don’t pretend to be a paragon of virtue, running or otherwise. The night before my birthday, I went out for (many) drinks and some dinner with a friend. Wine, whisky and I think there was a meat board at some point. The next day was my birthday and so I went out and did it all again, having dim sum and large amounts of prosecco with some of my nearest and dearest in London and a super time was had by all. London gets so lonely at times and it really helps to have memories like this, knowing that people are around. I’ve been more cautious about drinking the past few months; I’m aware of the effect that both being drunk, and being hungover has on my anxiety levels so I’m really glad that I had a few days of having fun and not worrying about repercussions, and there being no repercussions.

That week was a write off for running for obvious reasons. On the Saturday I was back at home for birthday celebrations with the parents, and dragged myself down to Lee-on-the-Solent parkrun. Yay! Parkrun! Yay! The seaside! I wasn’t trying to push it too hard with only a week left until the Bath Half but ended up with a time of 28:04 which while not a PB isn’t too shabby a time for me. I also pleasingly managed almost perfect splits. As pacing has been a bugbear for me, this was huge for me and I was on a real high, feeling like my running was finally progressing. My heart rate had been reasonably good, the whole run hadn’t felt too bad until I started my sprint finish too early; I think if I hadn’t mistimed that it would have easily been in the 27:5xs. Everything was good.

Then everything went wrong. So wrong.

On the Monday, I lost my job. I won’t rehash it all here but it was unexpected and dramatic. I phoned my mama and asked her to come to London, I phoned recruiters en route to the train station, I phoned a couple of friends to try and stay level while I awaited my mama’s arrival. Packed some bags. Came home to the coast for sea air and home cooking and awaited my inevitable meltdown. Except it never happened. Tears and panic attacks have come so easily, over the tiniest inconsequential things but in a real crisis, it seems I cope. I was stressed and sad but I coped. That’s worth knowing. If I can get through this, then that strength is also there to be utilised in my sillier moments.

I had grand plans for rest and running. This was going to be my highest mileage month ever! (Un)fortunately, the phone started ringing very quickly and my first two weeks at home were actually spent on trains to/from London, attending interviews. Thankfully, I received an offer a mere nine working days after losing my job.

The Bath Half came at the end of my first week of unemployment. In hindsight, I suspect the stress I was under probably played its part in it being a bad race for me. I thought I was just thrown off track by the unexpectedly nice conditions but looking back at the data from my Garmin, it seems to have been the start of some heart rate issues that I’ve been having ever since. I had no motivation to run after Bath; disheartened by a truly miserable race and a lack of routine without work meant a lot of napping and Netflix. When I did get back out there after 10 days or so without a proper run, my heart and lungs felt like they would explode. I chalked it up as a bad run and tried again a few days later but to no avail. My heart rate was way up near its max despite running significantly slower than my usual 5k pace. I rested some more, kept an eye on my resting heart rate and stared mournfully at the data. Following those bad runs my resting heart rate was high 70s/low 80s for a couple of days before returning to its normal level of high 50s/low 60s. I’ll see how things are when I get back to work and having routine and a normal life – impossible to know if this problem is physical or mental as the two are so closely linked for me.

The other run of note this month was at Southwark Parkrun. I know, those babes again. If you’re ever in south London, Southwark is a particularly wonderful parkrun and I can’t recommend it enough. This month, they very graciously agreed for a team from Mind to come and film me (tail)running as part of an upcoming campaign about exercise and mental health. Expect a more detailed post when the campaign launches. I had a delightful morning leisurely running at the back of the pack while a cameraman on inline skates whizzed past me before I stood in the park repeatedly waiting for helicopters to pass over and spoke about why parkrun is a great way to get into sport and its many benefits. I also got to meet the very lovely Louise and her boyfriend Ryan who experienced my near-evangelical ranting about why parkrun is the best but hey, we follow each other on Twitter now so I can’t have seemed too mad. Or maybe they enjoy madness. Thank you so much to the ever-wonderful team at Southwark for agreeing to the filming, and especially their event director Mike who was instrumental in making it happen. You are all stars. Finished product coming soon; expect repeated wails of “am I really that ginger?” (yes), “am  I really that pale?” (also yes), and “do I really make those faces when I run/speak?” (another yes).

April. The return to the London. A new job, again. Cheering as part of Team Mind at the London Marathon. (N.B. If you’re running the London Marathon, I’ll be the ginger one wearing a VERY fetching Mind t-shirt at Mile 25 at Embankment, send me your race number, I’ll track you and then high 5 you because you’ll be so close to finishing). Lighter evenings. Putting my life back together again.

 

And I am done with my graceless heart, so tonight I’m going to cut it out and then restart

9 months on and I still can’t walk past your office. I tried today. I went to an interview in the City that I think went well. Spring looked like it might finally be arriving in London and so I walked back to the station. It’s been a while since I enjoyed that walk.

And the second I stepped on to the Millennium Bridge and crossed towards the south bank, I felt sick. It was too close to lunch. The risk of crossing paths with you was too great. I should have got the tube. The entire length of the bank, my eyes darted over every passing stranger, absolutely terrified that eventually I was going to lock eyes with you.

When your office came into sight, I started to run. In 3 inch heels. In my smartest interview dress. Sprinting, the sort of effort I can only keep up for a few hundred metres. Damage limitation, the faster I’m past, the less chance of seeing you. Ridiculous really, you might not even work there now.

I’m done with it. This fear, this misery, it ends here. Today.