London Calling – Vitality London 10,000

Oh hi there readers, long time no see. The eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed there have been very few (read, zero) posts for a while now. I haven’t been running and I also haven’t been feeling too anxious, so there’s not been much to write about. Never fear, that’s all about to change.

Remember that time I was really sick at Bath Half? My running never really recovered from it. It turned into a couple of months  of misery, feeling breathless, sick, faint, and slow every time I ran and after several doctor’s appointments was diagnosed as an arrhythmia. So that explains a lot. This had not been the case when I signed up for a bank holiday weekend of racing, and convinced several friends they really wanted to do that too, and so I turned up to run a 10k, having not covered the distance in weeks on end and having lost a lot of (read, nearly all) aerobic fitness.

I was supposed to run the Westminster Mile on the Sunday but ended up staying out on the Saturday night so promptly wrote that off. I still love wine more than running. At 7am on a bank holiday Monday – an hour earlier than I get up for work – I was struggling to eat some toast and commiserating with friends via text about being awake. Thankfully, nobody seemed to quite remember at this point that it was entirely my fault we were doing this.

I met TeamPaella (or, friends I’m running in Valencia with this winter, to the uninitiated) in Green Park and was immediately a bit surprised by the scale of the operation.

TeamPaella

I live in London but hadn’t appreciated what a large event the Vitality London 10,000 is. As a side note, just how many races do Vitality want to sponsor? It feels like a lot of my year was supposed to be sponsored by Vitality until I had to miss a couple of races. It was a surprisingly chilly day (although I still nearly boiled while running, as is my way, despite shorts) and so we delayed heading to bag drop and having to cast off layers for as long as possible. And that’s how we ended up with a lot of pre-race selfies.

I actually found it to be a relatively bland route. It’s essentially a narrow loop from Pall Mall to the City and back, and aside from running through Trafalgar Square close to the beginning, and the last km starting with the Houses of Parliament and finishing with Buckingham Palace, I don’t find it very inspiring. I suspect some of the London magic is lost on me considering the City end of the loop is really just my lunchtime wanderings (we in fact were within <100m of my office at one point). I can’t fault the support and entertainment all the way along the route however, I don’t think there was a quiet point on the course.

I crossed the finish line in 1:04:30, which is a good 8 minutes away from my PB. A lot of me is sad and frustrated. A smaller part of me recognises that this really is fairly reasonable, given how much time I’ve had off. I was purposefully very cautious during the race both in terms of my pacing and building in a lot of walking because I was concerned about actually finishing, so I’m hoping now that I’ve broken through the psychological barrier of completing the distance again, I can start picking up some speed. I was rewarded for my efforts with some fairly excellent supersize bling, a finisher’s shirt that I actually like and might use (rarity!) and a goodie bag which included food and suncream (those who follow me on Twitter will know I’m militant about the sun). I sped through the most efficient bag collection I’ve known, and returned to Green Park to meet everyone who helpfully loitered despite all finishing about 15 minutes before me. It’s okay, they passed the time taking photos with their medals, they were happily occupied. Didn’t even notice I was gone.

We eventually met some of the others of the ukrunchat crowd (after much milling around letter B of the charity stands desperately trying to spot people in the crowd) and headed to the pub; a happy end a delightful bank holiday weekend.

 

It’s February again, we must get older

It’s time for the month in review! What’s been going on inside my head and where have my feet been taking me this month?

The month began on a serious high with my Time To Talk post going the smalltime blogger version of viral. I was asked in advance by the event director at Southwark parkrun if I had anything suitable for them to share as part of the day. I didn’t, but they’re good people so I wrote a piece on how parkrun has been more than just running to me. It ended up being retweeted a ridiculous number of times and being shared by so many parkruns, by parkrunners and by the founder, Paul Sinton-Hewitt. A bizarre day of people sending screenshots of my face as it popped up in their Facebook feeds via parkruns across the country.

Sporting my parkrun performance shirt. A ginger in apricot. Bold.

That post has now been viewed well over 5000 times, in over 40 countries. Thank you to all who supported, shared and talked about mental health on that day. You know how much the cause means to me and to have had even the tiniest impact was fantastic. The blog will probably never reach such lofty heights again!

Running has been a mixed bag. Again, the month started well. I managed a couple of post-work 5 milers, as opposed to my usual 5km. I’m slowly trying to up my overall mileage and it’s reassuring to have broken the mental block I had of doing more than 5km on a school night. This will seem such a tiny breakthrough to so many of you but my running is plagued with arbitrary and nonsensical negative mental blocks of my own forming and it’s taking a lot of resolve to dismantle them.

The first weekend in February I once again smashed my longest run, taking the distance to 17.1km/10.6 miles. With 5 weeks to go until Bath Half, this was hugely reassuring. Thank you to everyone at #ukrunchat that evening who confirmed that yes, that was indeed completely on track when I was having a wobble! The other bonus of that run was my pacing was almost spot on; a little slower than usual but that led to consistency with a couple of (actually very small) blips that I think correlate to where I paused to stretch my niggling calves.

But then came the dreaded lurgy. Classic February cold/flu/misery had been doing the rounds at the office and I finally succumbed in the second week of February. Coincidentally, also set up to be the toughest week I’ve had at this job yet. Life, oh life.  A week of feeling terrible both physically and mentally and not being able to run at all, so once again a month where my mileage is nowhere near as high as I had hoped. I’ve actually only run about 50km all month which is appalling. I’m frustrated but I know how dangerous for my emotional resilience it is to push myself too hard. A lot of rest, a lot of cups of tea and watching Netflix in leggings and ratty old jumpers, a lot of envying everyone talking about their running. I attempted a long slow run exactly one week after having run 17km. I made it through 3km with legs and a stomach feeling like lead, went home and was promptly sick. Another attempt at 5km in the week was cut short at around the 3km mark again with burning lungs. Super disheartening.

The following weekend I made it out for my long run with minimal confidence after almost 2 weeks off. I put myself through 16km, although with a few short walks thrown in there (at 3km, 10km, 14km). I’ve already written about how negative I felt after that run. I’m trying to be objective about it and be a lot kinder to myself. I was on course to be only about 2-3 minutes slower than my 17km run 2 weeks earlier. Considering that there was a good 5+ minutes of walking involved, I was just coming back from illness, I’d had some time off and it was horrendously windy out there, that’s not at all bad going. Pain and Panic are whispering that I’m making excuses but they can hush. I ran 16km when I wasn’t at my best, having expected to struggle to hit 10km, and I didn’t run them that badly. I didn’t run them anywhere near as well as I would have liked but you can’t always get what you want.

Given the setback of illness, I now won’t run the full half marathon distance until race day but I’ve now comfortably hit 15km+ on several occasions in the past 6 weeks without any real ill effect and I think I could probably have kept going. I think the adrenaline and atmosphere on the day will carry me through without too much fuss. It’s “less than a parkrun” (a well-established unit of distance!) to be added on my longest run and that’s not too terrifying. I’ve just hit the initial fundraising target I set when I signed up for Bath but as I’ve now planned an entire year of running for Mind, I’m hoping to absolutely smash that amount. Anyone feeling kind and inclined to donate, you can do so here and it means the world to me.

I went back to work and had a panicked couple of days trying to progress various matters before putting the out of office on and heading to Iceland.

Iceland was like Narnia

This actually prompted the biggest meltdown of the month, a severe 2 hour panic attack the night before my holiday and the first serious one I’ve had in a while. I can’t explain the terror that I experience knowing that emails are flooding into my inbox and not being able to deal with them. Holidays are more stress than they’re worth really. Anyway, Iceland. The highlight of my month and you can read about it in a lot more detail here. After recently wondering where I’m going in life, I’ve realised that maybe this is where I’m supposed to be right now, booking holidays on a near-whim with one of my best friends. Now we are home and I am planning our trip to Japan next year.

This morning I turned my work phone back on to be greeted with over 300 emails. I was only out the office for 3 days…A moment of inner panic, a couple of whiny messages to people, a tube journey spent sifting through the noise. By the time I stepped into the office, I knew where I stood, a huge number of emails had been deleted, more had been filed and I could start prioritising the relatively few that required any level of attention. That’s real progress. Once that scenario would have resulted in so much panic that I wouldn’t have made it to the office.

I’d hoped to pick the running back up tonight but leaving at gone 7pm and having to be back in for 7.30am is making that seem unlikely. Law is all kinds of fun.

That’s February done. On we march to March. In 2 days, I will be 27. In 13 days, I will be running my first half marathon for Mind. Work is set to be very busy (when is it not?). I have two incredibly exciting projects relating to this blog that I’m hoping to announce soon, I’m just waiting for confirmation on some details. It’s going to be a big month.

It’s oh so quiet

I don’t appear to be writing much do I? There’s a multitude of half written posts sat in my drafts but I’m lacking the words to finish any of them.

Everything is a bit…blank at the moment. I wouldn’t necessarily say I feel bad; I’ve certainly felt much worse. But I’m not feeling great either. I’m not feeling much of anything at all. Never quite sure if I find the indifference worse than the pain. It’s the prolonged nature of this lack of anything that I hate. At least pain spikes.

Probably not a coincidence that running isn’t going well. I was written off with lurgy last week and easing back into it is proving difficult. My inability to give myself a break either physically or mentally is a bit of a downfall. Trying to force too much on myself too soon and expecting myself to be brilliant because nothing less will do. I’m needlessly frustrating myself and smashing my confidence in the process.

Keep moving slowly forward, this too will pass soon. Normal service resuming shortly.

I can’t count the reasons I should stay

Mental illness can be isolating. Sometimes you do withdraw from your friends and colleagues. Sometimes, your friends and colleagues withdraw from you. Sometimes it’s that feeling of being surrounded by people but being completely alone. The illness wants you to be alone so that you’re more vulnerable because that’s how it keeps a greater hold on you.

Running can also be lonely. For the most part, I actually quite like that but I know a lot of people don’t. I do wonder if anxiety and depression have helped me build more resilience than I realise. If you can get through daily life feeling alone and feeling unmotivated, then perhaps being an hour into a tough run feels like small change in comparison.

I have more control over my running than most things in my life and that’s important because a lot of my own issues stem from a lack of control over my situation. With running, I can always have the support and motivation and the answers that I feel I’m lacking sometimes in my day to day life. Enter UKRunChat. An online community made up of everyone from those preparing for their first ever run to seasoned ultra-marathon runners to professionals such as physios/podiatrists/all sorts, UKRunChat can be found across Twitter (primarily), Facebook, Instagram and their own website.

The highlight (for me) of the community is UKRunChat Hour, held on Twitter from 8pm – 9pm every Sunday and Wednesday evening. In that time you can post whatever you like, using the #UKRunChat hashtag, or addressing them directly at @UKRunChat. @UKRunChat retweet a lot of the activity sent their way and a lot of the community check the hashtag as well, meaning that whatever you’ve posted tends to result in a wave of responses. It’s an extraordinarily inclusive community, there’s no question too small, nothing is considered silly and there’s no social anxiety of having to meet people or (the horror!) run in front of them, which can be terrifying for brand new runners.

Twice a week I get to interact with a network of runners across the entire country. It extends well beyond that, the #UKRunChat hashtag runs all the time; those 2 hours are just the real peaks of its activity. There are some fellow runners that I’m hoping I’ll meet in person at the Bath Half in March. There are people running the London Marathon whose race numbers I’ll be looking out for and cheering on. I have answers to every question about running I’ve ever had. I have support through injuries and bad runs because other people have had that injury, or are currently injured and empathise; other people have felt the frustration of not running your best. I have motivation when I need a kick to get me out the door, a whole flurry of distant voices to counteract my own negativity. Essentially, in running, I am now never alone and I am never unsupported. It’s a corner of my life where I’ve regained huge amounts of control.

Anyone wanting to join in, I’m on twitter at @lexiecarpenter talking running, mental health, a bit of my day job and more often than not, providing commentary on whatever I’m watching. Most active during 8pm – 9pm on Sunday and Wednesday for UKRunChat Hour but I pop in and out.

Postscript: Shortly after writing this post, I posted a link to it during UKRunChat Hour, and also posted a question asking other runners if they run when feeling tired, or whether they accept they need rest (I was feeling exhausted from my the first few days of my new job). In the space of an hour, I had over 125 notifications and was struggling to keep up with the response. The support from the community is absolutely staggering.