It’s a long time since I’ve posted anything on here and that’s mainly because I have dedicated this year to submitting my novel. Things are all quiet while I try to make headway. But instead of just staying quiet myself (I’m a writer after all) I thought I might share some posts about the other things I’ve been getting up to while waiting. Because there is an awful lot of waiting involved in trying to make a career of writing and a high risk of losing one’s mind. One has to find other things to do.
The most surprising thing I’ve been doing is running and I don’t think anyone is more surprised by it than me, with my long and dedicated history of non-running. In fact not just non-running but an actual life-long hatred of exercise – the getting sweaty, the feeling of breathing so hard you might puke or die, the increased requirement to shower. The general hassle and discomfort of it all. Even as a child I wasn’t very keen. I did do sport, particularly netball, but even then I preferred being goalkeeper because you only had to run around one third of the court. On sports day I preferred 100m because it was over the quickest. I could just about stretch to 400m if I really had to but that was my absolute maximum and I still probably would have chugged in last trying not to vomit up a lung. I do not have an impressive history of exerting myself physically. So what on earth drove me and my 42 year old peri-menopausal body to suddenly start running? Well. It was partly a hill, partly a man and partly too much cholesterol. I started the year unfit. I didn’t look especially unfit – I have always been an averagely sized human who would not have fallen into an overweight category except on the harshest of measures. A solid size 12. Perhaps that led to some complacence about my actual fitness. Early in the year, we went for a walk. My husband has a friend who is a very outdoorsy kind of guy. My husband and our boys and his friends and his girls have over the years formed a kind of Gang For The Intrepid. They go off adventuring with canoes and up hills and with camping equipment. They like a tarpaulin. Our friend has a grappling hook and he knows exactly how to use it and he would. Just so you can picture the level of intrepid we’re talking. I would equate it to Military. Anyhow, I think it’s pretty obvious by this point that though I am very fond of all the members of the gang, I am not actually in it. They adventure and I stay at home and read a book. Recently, they all went camping in torrential rain and high winds and I went to Book Club. If that doesn’t adequately sum up our differences I don’t know what would. But this one day, they persuaded me the walk was “easy” and I mistook military-standard easy for an amble around a country park easy and somehow agreed to it. Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty. I thought I might die and I’m only slightly exaggerating. The incident played on my mind – not just because I felt like a tit, but because I am only 42 years old and how could I find walking up a hill so difficult? It made me feel bad about myself – not just about my fitness but somehow the whole of me as a person. I felt like I’d let myself go. I felt like I was failing at being a functioning, healthy human. But although this was enough to make me feel miserable, it wasn’t actually enough of a kick up the backside to get me running. That came later when I eventually went for my over-forties free NHS health check. I was anxious about that because like many people who have lost someone to cancer, my health anxiety is now a little out of control. In my mind, blood test obviously equals shock cancer diagnosis. I would have thought I was a little insane for making this leap but my best friend who’s been through a similar experience does it too. It’s cancer’s fault. So when I got a text message the evening of my blood test, my heart did a little fear-induced leap. The fear quickly turned to outrage when I discovered the problem was my cholesterol. And no, it wasn’t the good kind. As a teetotal vegetarian, I was fuming. How could this possibly have happened? Surely I wasn’t your obvious high-cholesterol candidate? I kept chunnering about it over the next days in ongoing outrage. But that hill-walking incident kept coming back to haunt me. I didn’t exactly exercise, did I? Could it be that I actually was a prime-candidate for clogged arteries? The daily dose of full fat yoghurt wasn’t helping either but perhaps I really did need to get my daily step count up. I started power-walking the dog. I stopped avoiding the village hill and purposefully included it in the dog walk. For the first while I predictably hated it. Bloody hills! Horrible things really. But I’m very stubborn when I set my mind to something and I wasn’t going to be beaten. Least of all by a hill. I had absolutely no intention of running. I would power-walk and tackle hills and do more steps and ta-da! I’d be fine. That was the plan. Until one really weird night when I hadn’t done as many steps as I’d wanted during the day and I got a sudden desire to jog around my living room. The thought came to me tentatively, creeping into my conscious. Could I, maybe, despite everything become a runner? No! Absolute lunacy! With this body which at certain points in the month was struggling to get off the sofa? No! At forty-two? Don’t be ridonculous! I wasn’t a running kind of person. My husband is. He always has been. My son is – he’s a budding footballer. But I wasn’t. I was a stay at home and read a book kind of person. Wasn’t I? Thing was though, did I want to be her? The person who couldn’t walk up hills? Could you choose who to be? Did I have a fit version of myself buried deep inside somewhere? If I tried really hard, could she be found? The next thing I knew I was huffing and puffing my way around a field. It was awful. Really horrible. I thought I might die. I was sweaty. I couldn’t really breathe. The whole thing was one enormous battle. Did people really do this voluntarily? Did they enjoy it? What was actually wrong with them? Then I did it again. And again. And for some reason that I don’t understand but was probably stubbornness, I kept doing it. I found a Fitbit in my son’s bedroom and started wearing it. I could just about run 300m and then I thought I’d die. I could run for about 3 minutes with some walking in between if I tried really hard. It was all very unpleasant. That was April. I kept going with the hope that I’d get better at it and maybe I’d feel better about myself when I did. If I could just make it to 1km I’d be pleased. It’d be the furthest I’d ever run in my whole life and surely things became a bit respectable when they ended in a km and not just a m? And I did make it to 1km. It took a while. I had to settle my panicky breathing and override the urge to just get it over with but I got there and I was so bloody chuffed with my previously non-running self. And I think it was maybe at that point when I began to see that running could be a really good counter-balance to other things in my life like my writing career. With running you could progress relatively quickly. You could set yourself little time or distance or speed targets and when you hit them, you could feel good. You didn’t have to wait months or years for something to maybe, possibly, hopefully happen – you could graft and make it happen yourself relatively quickly. You didn’t need to beg for tiny scraps of positive feedback, you just had to glance down at your Fitbit. Despite not enjoying physical exertion, I am suited to working hard or dedicating myself to something. It wasn’t long before I wanted to go further but I got a bit stuck at about 1.5km. A chance chat with my brother about heart zones was transformative and by keeping my heart rate purposefully lower, I could suddenly run 2km. I have since extended it to 3km which involved running non-stop for about 25mins. And I wasn’t even dying at the end. What has happened to me? I don’t even know who I am anymore. September me is literally running ten times further than April me. September me can keep going for more than eight times the duration of my first close to death attempts. And, whisper it, I think there’s more in the tank. I’m not quite sure what’s happened to January-couldn’t-get-up-the-hills me. I think what I’m saying is that running can make you feel differently about yourself in the best possible way. It’s a great counter to slower moving, more soul-destroying things like writing. It’s made me feel more capable as a person, at times even powerful. It’s helped me to gain some control over my hormones. The perimenopause supplement I’ve started is also a major game-changer but between the two of them, my energy levels are completely different. This is probably over-sharing but this month I have ran three times during my period – I can’t overstate how impossible that would have been for January-me. I was finding even daily tasks an uphill battle and would have laughed you out the room if you’d suggested I went for a run. (I wouldn’t have just laughed, clearly there’d have been swearing and hormone-fuelled derision. I may even have been tempted to launch something at you. Hard). And probably because I feel so much better in general, I’m coping with the lack of writing developments better. I still find the rate of progress and the over-whelming silence difficult but it isn’t as all-consuming as it could be. I’ve just survived the world’s longest summer holiday without losing my mind too. So, somehow, despite all the odds, I’m pro-running. I’d recommend it, especially to those absolute non-runners out there. If I can, you can. Plus, it makes you wonder what else can be accomplished if after 42 years of dedicated non-running, someone like me can suddenly become a runner…
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AuthorNicola Ashbrook Archives
September 2023
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