Sometimes exercise helps you escape for a little while, and sometimes that little while is exactly what you need for your mental health.
I had always run. I was good at it and it had always been part of who I was.
But I had never run marathons.
After a tough episode in my life I started running again, properly.
Running gave me somewhere to put the noise in my head. Somewhere to breathe. Somewhere to feel like I was achieving something when other parts of life felt completely out of my control.
And somewhere along the way, I collected people.
Friends I had gone to school with. Old friends who became running friends.
Looking back, I think we were probably all running away from something in our own way.
We were all going through our own things personally, but we trained together, raced together and kept each other going.
Road races, trails, half marathons, marathons.
And medals.
Oh, the medals.
My dearest friend Stuart will tell you that I was VERY invested in getting a medal at the end of a race.
He once sent me off on a 20-mile trail race where you were given a map to navigate the route.
There were loads of runners, so I thought, I don’t need a map. I’ll just follow everyone else.
Excellent plan.
Until about mile 18, when I lost the pack.
I had absolutely no idea where I was going.
I ran up and down the same hill three times, completely lost, exhausted, frustrated and eventually crying angry tears because I had already run nearly 20 miles and just wanted to find the bloody finish line.
Eventually, I found someone who pointed me in the right direction.
I finally staggered across the finish line, absolutely spent, expecting my hard-earned medal.
They handed me a pink cap.
A CAP.
And there was Stuart, standing at the finish, quite happily eating a burger.
I think you can probably imagine where that cap ended up.
Straight round Stuarts head.
Years later, that story still makes me laugh.
And actually, that is what I remember most about those running years.
Yes, there were marathons and finish lines and medals.
But there were also friendships.
There was laughter.
There were tears.
There were ridiculous adventures.
There were hours spent running alongside people who were dealing with their own lives, their own problems and their own pain.
Sometimes we talked about it.
Sometimes we didn’t.
Sometimes we just ran.
Running gave us a sense of achievement when we needed one.
It gave us goals when life felt uncertain.
It gave us people beside us when we might otherwise have felt alone.
It gave us something to look forward to.
And for me, it gave me somewhere to go while I found my way back to myself.
Maybe exercise doesn’t make the difficult things disappear.
But sometimes it gives you enough space from them to breathe.
Enough confidence to realise you can do hard things.
Enough friendship to remind you that you are not travelling through life completely on your own.
We might all have been running from something.
But for a while, we were running together.
And somewhere amongst the miles, the mud, the angry tears, the laughter, the medals — and one very disappointing pink cap — I think we were finding our way forward too.
