My first London Marathon is three weeks away!
This is quite the development, looking back at my relationship with physical exertion. When I was a teenager I HATED exercise. Not only did it make you all hot and sweaty and out of breath, it also made you less intelligent. Yes, I was low enough on intellect to think that sporting ability had to be inversely proportional to academic ability, and so if you became more athletic your brain would turn to mush. I have no idea where I got this belief from, as my dad was a football coach with a degree and I was at a very academic grammar school where the hockey team won the national Under 16 competition in my year group. Every single member of that team was not only bright enough to have got into grammar school, but many of them were in the top ten in exams each year. I obviously wasn’t as clever as I thought I was, since I hung onto my idea that sport made you stupid all the way through my secondary education.
The only sport I’d play was badminton, as there was no physical contact and the racquets and shuttles and nets were all pleasingly light; I didn’t feel threatened by it.
When I went to university things changed a lot as I discovered that the social groups that enjoyed the most enthusiastic relationship with alcohol, which I believed was one of my closest friends back then, were the sports teams. I joined the football team and took up rowing, and started a women’s cricket team at my college. Suddenly I was running around in the mud, sometimes even when it was raining and a bit nippy out…who even was this girl? Cricket was much more me – you never play if it’s raining, you don’t have to run very often, and there’s cake at half time. But football gave me access to a whole world of totally legitimised alcohol consumption, and the 19 year old me thought this was huge fun.
My relationship with sport and physical activity reverted to pre-university norms after I left and got a full time job, with the odd run thrown in every time my weight crept up over a certain amount. I hated running with a passion – the puffing and panting, the jiggling and joggling, and the beetrooty redness it brought on. But I did it a few times a month to punish myself for all the excessive food and alcohol I was consuming at that time in my life.
Fast forward to having my first child and I did Couch to 5k and realised I could actually rather enjoy running. It was a bit of legitimate me-time, and people really congratulated me for going out there and exercising when I had the excuse of staying at home with my daughter. In fact that bit of outdoor activity without a baby attached to me now felt like the only bit of freedom I had, as she was a terrible sleeper and I hated feeling so needed. My relationship with running started to improve, and a couple of years after I had my son and moved back to Yorkshire from London I even joined a running club and entered the Great North Run. I ended up not being able to do it because of injury but I really started to feel like this was my hobby.
When I finally realised that my nightly drinking was no longer serving me and decided to go alcohol free in 2020, I unlocked a whole new level of loving exercise. I took up weight training (with Liz!), and cycling and swimming. I then decided to enter a novice triathlon with some ladies from my cycling club and was hooked! Running though has been the constant since then – my favourite triathlon discipline because it is cheap and easy and doesn’t require any equipment or facilities. I’m a member of a lovely friendly running club and was lucky enough to get a place in the London Marathon through them, so on April 21st 2024 I’ll be lining up in Blackheath to attempt to complete it. I’m running for two wonderful voluntary organisations, the Sober Butterfly Collective and Alcohol Change UK, and I’ll be wearing some rather fetching butterfly wings in honour of SBC!
The training has been huge fun and rather than dreading even the longest runs (up to 21 miles) I’ve really enjoyed it. I’ve created Facebook events for my long run on the Leeds-Liverpool canal each week on Sunday mornings and opening them up to anyone who wants to try running, or join me for the whole thing. People have come along for their first ever attempt at running, done a mile and then run back to the start while I’ve carried on for the distance I needed to do; others have done their first run-walk intervals with me on these runs, and others have stuck with me the whole way as a more sociable way of doing their own marathon training. I’ve met new friends, chatted about health, wellbeing and sobriety and been told I’ve inspired a few to do longer races one day!
So if you’re thinking you’d like to try running, whether you want to try your first mile or first marathon, I can highly recommend it. If you think you hate running, try run-walk intervals and don’t put pressure on yourself to lose the walk sections – run-walk is a completely legitimate way of completing any race of any distance. Ultramarathoners walk plenty! Let me know how you get on – I’d love to hear your running story.
