"You can only lose what you cling to.” Buddha

Did I mention running to you? It would be a fair observation that you would not look at me and necessarily think, "I bet that guy runs." Looks can be deceptive.

I have run in all ages of my life but, at various times of my life, it has been to a better or worse standard relative to my own well being. When I am unfit it normally coincides with periods of depression, injury, weight gain and self neglect. This had occurred in cycles my entire life. Whether there was a cause-effect relationship there I couldn't say but with reflection I do know that I tended to where dark shapeless clothing, hunch over, grow a beard or some other kind of facial hair in these periods. I looked like a cube with a small ball balanced on top that someone has thrown a blanket over because it is unsightly. As I aged I became completely bald too so the facial hair made me look as though I had my head on upside down.

It was only through therapeutic education, alongside treatment and counselling, that I could see these cycles within clear symptomatic behaviour of complex trauma. As I began to understand the causes, triggers, intrusions and resulting outcomes I was sufficiently motivated and self aware to begin the process of correcting the erroneous thinking.

I had been in this period of distress since September 2019. By December '19 I weighed eighteen stone and a few fluctuating pounds. I am five feet nine inches tall so I looked like someone had taken a bicycle pump, stuck it in an available orifice and inflated my sometimes cube shape to charlie-and-the-chocolate-factory-violet-beaurgarde-esque proportions. I was Round.

I had always found that if I set out for a run with a thorny problem in mind by the time I have finished the 'meditation in motion' I will have a solution.

Clearly running was a to become very important part of my recovery. I would put a strategy, technique or lesson at the forefront of my mind and set off.

Those early runs were exercises in socially acceptable self harm. I would come back sweating rivers, spitting blood (never in public) heart pounding well beyond recommended maximum sustainable, breath ragged in my throat, eyes stinging and nose streaming from exercise induced rhinitis. Think rabid English bull dog.

As time past I began to improve and I will admit that I still needed and wanted that sense of abuse. I believed I deserved it, I was pretty harsh still in my thinking in those early days. I ran faster and further and harder because the effort required to achieve the same degree of pain was so much greater. Conversely I became a better runner.

Have you noticed that the things we do become how we think of who we are? Somewhere in the hundreds of miles, half a dozen pairs of shoes, a few pairs of sunglasses, numerous tubs of Vaseline and packet after packet of ibuprofen that followed I began to come to terms with myself. I had become runner.

In fact between March and October 2020 I ran 2,118 km's or 1,316 miles.

Yet here I now was looking up a single flight of stairs and wondering if I could climb them. Isn't Vision all about perspective and purpose?

Who was I in these early days of 2021? I had become 'Infected.' In that week I had been told that there was now just a 75% chance that antibiotics would eradicate the infection without further surgery, I'd had 38 surgical staples removed, I had constant pain in skin I could not feel, and legs I could not control.

I had a goal of running a half decent 10k before my 50th Birthday. Coming back to those stairs, I realised that clinging to the vision of running was not a life preserver. Every time I thought of that I would be forced to re-examine how much progress I had made towards it. Every review would dishearten and demoralise. It was a lead weight around the legs, not a buoyancy aid.

I can't tell you if I lost it, gave it up or had it stolen from me but that was the night that running became a goal too far.