Category: Depression

Review: There is No Wall

Jess GuthLeave a comment

I logged off from work for the year on Friday, spent Saturday in the kitchen baking and cooking and cleaning which was a great brain re-set and then spent Sunday not doing much at all really. Kath was still working yesterday but we did the Christmas food shop early and then I curled up on the sofa to finally finish reading Allie Bailey’s There is no Wall. I started this a while ago after we listened to Allie talk at the Ilkley Literature Festival and then bought the book. Kath read it first and then I started it. Then I got busy at work again and as so often happens, just didn’t read for pleasure. I picked the book up again last night and went back a bit.

The book is phenomenal. It made me laugh, it made me cry quite a lot, it made me breathe deeply, be thankful for what I have and at the same time ask questions of myself that are not entirely comfortable. The book is and isn’t about running. It’s a lovely and at times brutally real antidote to the social media and new year new you nonsense. It’s about mental health, addiction, faking it, asking for help and accepting it and, to me anyway, it’s about finding your values and recognising them as fundamental to everything really. I love the honesty in the writing. I love that the swearing isn’t edited out, that the tone of the book isn’t polished into a beautiful narrative that sort of glosses over how dark Allie’s story really is. The writing is good, really good but it’s gritty and real.

I will need more time to really reflect on the book but there are a couple of things that really stand out to me

  1. The stories we tell ourselves. Allie notes that that the stories we believe are the ones we tell ourselves (or are told) most often but reminds us that we have a choice what thoughts and stories we believe. We have a choice. That’s really fucking powerful.
  2. External validation doesn’t get us very far. Our self-worth has to come from us, not from what we think others think of us
  3. Values are key to EVERYTHING
  4. There is a big knowing-doing gap. I had never thought about it as a knowing-doing gap before (I am probably late to the party here as always as apparently this is a pretty well known idea – it just wasn’t to me) but it is such an obvious way of describing it and applies to me all the time! As Allie notes, it’s really hard to bridge that gap and not just shout back as you fall further down the huge crevice the gap can create

I am feeling the knowing-doing gap particularly keenly at the moment. I know consistency is key to almost everything. I know good fuelling is key to being healthy, I know stretching and strength work are crucial to staying healthy, I know I need to focus on the stories I tell myself about running, I know I need to do the hard work and I know I need to start doing it now – with kindness and love, but now. Doing it is so much harder than knowing it though. And I think that is why I like the book so much. There is no pretence that any of this is easy. Getting your shit together is hard and it stays hard. You don’t just suddenly get your ducks in a row and then they stay there and you live happily ever after. Or maybe other people who have never experienced poor mental health do. No idea. I have been nowhere near as ill as Allie and I am grateful for that but I also expected running, at a very very different level of of course, to save me. And for a while it did. I got fitter, so much fitter. I could do things. I could view my body in terms of what it could do rather than what the number on my clothes label said and somehow that all helped.

But I haven’t really done the work on me, I know this. Because when the running fell to pieces because of Covid and busy-ness and toxic workplaces and all the shit that life can throw at you and personal bests and races well run or at least struggled through to claim mental victory were replaced by DNF or actually mostly DNS, running was (is?) just another problem. My body is now not delivering, I am not strong, I am not fit – so how should I see my body, myself, now? Allie is right, running won’t save you from whatever demons you have but I also think she is right that running can buy you time to save yourself. I think through most of my running I have been both running away from stuff and running towards who I want to be, the balance has just varied. And who I want to be is not far off who I am right now in this moment sitting here writing this. I am happy. I am relatively healthy. I look forward too much and could do with being more in the moment and I know a lot of stuff that I am doing fuck all about. But I am aware and I am taking tiny little baby steps to start building a bridge across the knowing-doing gap. Running helps me meet my black puppy with curiosity and kindness every time it appears, it helps me make better decisions day to day, it helps me accept things as they are so I can start from there, it helps me breathe deeply when I need to and it helps me be kinder, most of all to myself. Those are the things that save us – if we do the work.

Read the book. Even if you think you’re fine, even if you don’t run. Read it because it is just a bloody good book about a remarkable woman. And somehow it is a book of tremendous hope.

Meh, meh and meh again

Jess Guth1 Comment

Ah well that glorious few seconds at the end of the last run I wrote about was short lived. I’ve been out once sine then and it was fairly miserable. Although I was excited I’d got out at all. Then I got a little busy with stuff and with excuses so did sweet FA for the rest of the week. Yesterday was supposed to be ‘Dopey proof of time day’ but there was absolutely no way I was dragging my arse round the Manchester Half Marathon and Kath is still coming back from injury. So no proof of time for us so we will be starting our Dopey races at the back – hopefully not dead last though. It’s a bit meh to have not started yet another race. But we went to Manchester anyway and had a lovely Saturday, wandering round the city, watching the world go by, drinking mocktails and generally just being. It was lovely. Somehow though on Sunday I was exhausted. I slept for a chunk of the afternoon when we got back and I went to bed really early and slept for about 11 hours. I feel marginally better today. I am not really up for doing hard things though. Every excuse busting trick in the book isn’t really working. I am happy on the sofa and not at all interested in moving off it. Possibly a bit of depression, maybe just end-of-term fatigue. Who knows but it’s meh.

I need to something else. I am going to see if posting my plan for the week here helps me actually do it – I am not promising. You might just get a week of excuses but here goes:

Today I was going to run. I haven’t. I have done an upper body strength session and 5km on the bike (was meant to be 10k but my legs died – meh). I will do my Daily stretches and the foot injury prevention session 1 before bed

Tuesday: I am off work so no excuses! 45 minute run and I would like to re-start the Dynamic Runner strength programme. Daily stretches and Foot session.

Wednesday: Re-try the 10k bike, Daily stretches and foot session and the 2nd strength session

Thursday: Rest (I am away for work) so just daily stretches and foot session. If I want to do something because I am bored in the hotel, there’s a beginner barre that doesn’t need equipment or much room

Friday: Still away so a morning run from hotel – 45 minutes ish. Daily stretches and the last foot session

Saturday: 5 mile run, Strength Session 3 and Daily Stretches

Sunday: Bike, Daily stretches and Session 1 of another injury prevention programme – maybe the ankle strength one (7 days)

The Daily Stretches are always around 15-18 minutes and the foot programme is no more than 10 minutes each time. The strength sessions are 20-30minutes. And yes I know it is not the ideal plan with the strength sessions back to back etc but it’s where they fit in around being away. I’ll keep you posted!

Is it fun to do the impossible?

Jess GuthLeave a comment

Ah yes, running. It’s been crap. I am totally inconsistent, I have zero motivation, my lungs don’t feel right (Covid damage? Just totally unfit?), my back and hips are niggly, everything is tight, hay fever is a bitch and my head is not up for doing hard things at the moment. I want easy, comfort zone, not pushing anything anywhere. I am not currently convinced that it might be kind of fun to do the impossible. I’m really not.

BUT, I also really want to be able to do stuff. I miss my fitness, I miss running just being a thing that I do and not an endless drama and mind games to actually get myself out of the door. I want to do the Dopey Challenge in January, I want to do the Great North Run in September and all the milestones and adventures in-between and I want to do them with joy. I want to have fun. I don’t want it all to just be one big long miserable slog. So I need to get fitter. A lot fitter. Which means I have to go do the things that are impossible and hope that somewhere somehow the fun comes back and I re-discover the joy.

So today’s step 1 or the many many step 1s and re-starts and re-boots and whatever over the last few weeks and months: Get out and run. I had put off going for a run all week. One thing I am good at is excuses. I could give you a perfectly reasonable sounding one for each run I didn’t do. None of them are justifiable really. though. So anyway the plan today was for us each to go to our own thing before breakfast and by the time I properly woke up, Kath was already out on her loop and just about back home. We had a coffee together and Einstein cat came into bed so there’s 2 excuses to not go right there – first that we were going to have breakfast together and I had slept a lot later than Kath and she was already back and so she’d be hungry so I should just make breakfast and go later (going later basically never happens). Kath put that excuse to bed by declaring she was happy having granola and we could just do our own thing. Einstein is Kath’s cat through and through so I rarely get cuddles with him so I really didn’t want to disturb him cuddled right into me curled up under my legs. Again Kath pointed out that I could just go when he moved and it really didn’t matter – nowhere to be today.

So, vaguely plausible excuses put to bed, I got out of bed. I’d been thinking about where to go. I really struggle on any sort of up. It’s like the minute my lungs have to actually work they can’t. I get out of breath really quickly and sort of grind to a halt. Obviously therefore I avoid up. That’s not going to help. So I decided that I would start with up this morning and walk towards Keighley Gate. Added bonus here that setting off walking is less scary than setting of running. I couldn’t actually remember whether I am supposed to be on a 3 mile weekend or whether it’s a 5 mile weekend and honestly at this point I don’t care. The plan is gone. I just need to build some sort of consistency somehow. I thought 2 miles up and 2 miles down would be good.

I set off on a good march up the hill. After about 50 metres I was huffing and puffing and after a further 50 metres I thought maybe this was a really bad idea. Lungs were burning and I was huffing and puffing and really wanted to slow down. I slowed a little bit just to breathe but kept walking. I made it to be mile in about 19.5 minutes which actually in my history of walking that stretch really isn’t too bad.I was knackered though. Onwards. At 1.5 miles my back said Hi with a sharp pain across the bottom right. I might have yelped. My hip joined in. At 1.65 miles I thought it was all a bit silly and I should head back down before anything really hurts. I started jogging and it was ok. Pain wasn’t worse really but now I felt hot. I put 30 seconds walk breaks in every minute or 90 seconds. I was making a really conscious effort to make sure the run was positive overall. I was slightly irritated that I was using walk breaks on what is essentially a long downhill but it also felt like the right thing to do.

And then, for just a brief moment the magic returned. As I turned left onto our road, everything felt perfect. There was no pain, no niggle even, my form felt perfect, my glutes properly engaged, my speed picked up but felt almost effortless. For just a short 30 seconds ish at the end of my run everything came together, rhythm, cadence, breathing, form. It felt perfect. It is fun to do the impossible. There is joy in hard after all. Now how do I bottle that? How do I hang on to that when my body and mind are screaming at me that it’s all pointless and I can’t run anyway so why bother trying? I don’t know, but for now I’ll take it.

And, if I told you that Disney pace requirement is 16 minute mile, you will understand from the screen short below why today’s effort had an added bonus level of excitement:

Screenshot of Strava activity showing pace at 15.59

Festive Ultra Day 3 and some New Year New You reflections.

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I did not sleep well at all. I woke up not all that long after having fallen asleep to an absolute downpour outside, then I needed to pee, then at just after 3am Storm cat woke me purring and rubbing and being her best fluffy cuddly self (I assume she was hungry) and then, just after I dozed off again it was time to get up. I felt all achey and grumpy and sore. I dropped Kath off at the station and drove to the office. When I looked at my messages once I got there, Kath had had to walk home because there were no trains into Leeds due to flooding at Kirkstall. Well, at least she got a couple of miles on the board for us!

I have been overwhelmingly tired all day. I’ve tried to get on with stuff but I’ve just made mistakes and couldn’t quite get my brain to where it needed to be. Maybe because I am tired, or maybe because fitness (or the lack of it) is on my mind because of this festive ultra, I am seeing adverts for diets, exercise programmes and for ‘health’ apps everywhere. My timelines on social media are full of advice to help me ‘have [my] fittest year yet’, ‘finally lose that unwanted weight’, ‘get rid of hormonal weight gain fast’ or simply ‘have your best year ever’. There’s an awful lot of new year, new you stuff out there at the moment. That’s been whirling around in my head as we dragged our slightly tired, slightly grumpy backsides off the sofa and went for a walk to make up today’s distance.

So in the silences in between off-loading about work and putting the world to rights I was mulling the idea of ‘new year, new you’ and I can see the attraction of picking a point in time to start over, to do things differently. I am often guilty of picking an arbitrary date to change something – to start running again (in fact isn’t the festive ultra just that – an arbitrary thing to get me into a habit of exercising again?). The more I think about it, the more the idea reminds me of a coaster I have with the slogan in the picture. Tomorrow, next week, next year is attractive because it never has to come, we can always pretend we’re going to do things tomorrow. It can always be tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow – hang on that’s a different story altogether). So the particular tomorrow of New Years is slightly different because we tell ourselves that on this given tomorrow, things will actually change. But here’s the thing, as the clock rolls over from the 31st December to the 1st January, you don’t suddenly change. You are still the same person with the same habits (good or bad), the same influences around you, the same pressures, the same hopes and dreams, the same biases, prejudices and ways of thinking and being. A clock, a calendar moving from one minute, year, to the next doesn’t change your lifetime of becoming you. It’s just another tomorrow.

I have, over the years, ranted about the new year, new you thing. Particularly in relation to health, fitness and exercise it does so much harm, causes so much unhappiness and costs a ton of money. I’m not going to repeat that rant. I’ve been reflecting on the mythical tomorrow of New Year and on making resolutions, on planning, on thinking about aspirations for the coming year and the extent to which we are conditioned to think that we somehow need to be better. I actually think that pressure is there in the media all year but it takes on a particular aggressive and persistent form as we count down to next year. A lot of the adverts seems to suggest that previously we’ve just been doing it wrong, buying the wrong products or following the wrong plan so surely in the New Year we’ll be smarter and finally do the right thing… or maybe this year we just haven’t been trying hard enough so surely in the New Year (tomorrow?) we will focus and finally commit and do what’s been determined to be right for us. I doubt any of that is true and all those of you who have been doing your best, who have been surviving and juggling and muddling through – I see you. I am you.

I am trying to be immune to that intense pressure but it doesn’t always work. Sometimes I think about how I must get my running back on track properly, how I need to implement x-y-z strategy or plan and just bloody well do better. But I am trying to be gentle and kind. On the 1st January 2024 I will, hopefully, still be just me. I will have had another birthday so my number will have rolled on by 1. I’ll still be fat and unfit (but maybe just a little less unfit than I am today), I’ll still be my reflective, slightly grumpy overthinking self. I’ll still suffer periods of depression and anxiety. I’ll still have an irrational and slightly over the top love of all things Disney and I’ll still think I can do anything when I am sitting on the sofa and don’t actually have to do it. Will I make any resolutions for 2024? Nope. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have hopes and dreams for the year. I’d love to run consistently, I’d love to continue the much healthier work life/ non work life balance that the last couple of months of 2023 have brought. I’d like to have time to think and read and dream. But resolutions won’t get me there. Resolutions are a sort of pressure. A requirement to be better, to do. Resolutions have to be measurable otherwise how do you know you’re being better? They involve comparing and numbers and tracking and measuring and and and… And I already have way too much measuring and metric-ing in my work life.

So there will be no aims or targets to lose weight, to run longer or faster, to be more successful or productive. There will be no requirement to ‘do’. There’ll be none of that, nothing measurable, nothing tangible. I just want to wake up on January 1st, linger, listen to purrs, drink coffee and anticipate the magic and wonder that 2024 holds. In the meantime – back to measuring. We are at 52km, just over 30% to target so we are still going strong – even if my feet say otherwise.

Update to Cycle 3 review: Stepping up, being tired and my wonder woman zone

Jess GuthLeave a comment

So I got off my arse and did my final workout for Cycle 3 just now. I did the Super Sweaty Saturday Live from yesterday. Well, I’m sweaty alright. Anyway, honestly my heart sank when Joe Wicks cheerfully announced that the were stepping things up today and were going to be working for 40 seconds and resting for 20 seconds. I wondered if I could just quickly set my own timer and try and work on 30/30 but that seemed like too much of a faff so I thought I’d just see how I got on. Then Joe said how tired he was and how he needed the workout and later on in the session he talks about how exercise always gives energy rather than take it away. So I spent the first few minutes, the entire warm up basically thinking about that my reaction to the ‘stepping things up’ and the point about being tired and therefore needing the workout. I don’t like stepping things up. Stepping things up usually means that I can’t do them. I think over years of PE at school, exercise classes, the gym the language of stepping up has come to mean making it so hard I can no longer do it. I realised I don’t think in terms of stepping it up when I teach or when I am doing anything other than exercise. I think in terms of progressing or sometimes in terms of working a little harder but never in terms of stepping up. I completely understand that this is a language thing going on in my head and that it’s a bit silly but my brain is conditioned to think that ‘step up’ is not for me. ‘Step up’ is for fit people who ‘do’ exercise and fitness. ‘Step up’ is not out of comfort zone it’s out of the zone you’re in when you’re out of the comfort zone. ‘Step up’ is not nice territory. ‘Right then’ said me to me ‘Let’s not step things up then, let’s just stick a toe out of our comfort zone and see what it feels like and if we don’t like it, Joe and his 40 seconds of burpees or whatever can go take a running jump’. So that was the stepping it up sorted.

As I ran on the spot for the first exercise I was still thinking about being tired and how I have been all week and the extent to which that’s just an excuse and I really should just get over myself and get things done. As I went through the exercises I kept coming back to that thought. And I think there’s an element of that but for me there are three distinct types of tired. One is just lack of sleep, general busyness tired and for that sort of tired exercise always helps. Usually though with that sort of tired I also know that, keep it in mind and motivation isn’t an issue. Then there is the tiredness that comes with anxiety, too much busyness, high stress levels and idiocy and a system running on high alert for too much of the time. Here motivation can be hard and it is a fine balance between whether exercise will help or make things worse. Sometimes I won’t know until I try. Sometimes exercise is exactly what’s needed and it feels good to do something with the excess adrenalin. Sometimes though it seems to add to stress and I get panicky. Bizarrely even the calmest yoga sequence can make me panic when I’m like that. And the third sort of tiredness is the depression tiredness which is hard to explain to anyone who has never experienced it. It feels like I physically cannot get off the sofa. It feels heavy and dark and overwhelming. I am sure exercise would help but it’s impossible until that depression tiredness lifts and the only way to make it lift, other than just wait it out, is to move, which feels impossible. Sometimes I can go for a walk or do some gentle stretches and when I can, I can then often progress to something else like a run or HIIT quite quickly, even on the same day. But often I just can’t move. So tiredness is not just one thing and whether exercise helps or is even possible really depends on the type of tired for me. Sometimes of course I am also just lazy but that’s another story.

I put music on for today’s session. We moved the CD player into the back room (where we have all our exercise stuff) last weekend and I wonder if it might be a game changer. There was random dancing in the rest breaks yesterday which just made the whole thing fun and somehow feel less like just exercise and more like just being silly but today the music actually really helped with the workout. I noticed it most on the upper body exercises or those that require some sort of upper body strength. For example for both the Mountain Climbers and the Plank Jacks I can’t normally do 35 seconds before my shoulders cave in – Or I can do so if they are the first exercise to really put pressure on shoulders but not if they come later in the sequence. For the first round today I managed the Mount climbers by just focusing on the music and the rhythm of that. I managed the Plank Jacks with just one brief shake off of the arms in the middle. In the 2nd round I had to shake off the arms for both once but that was the only break and it was less than 5 seconds. I suppose the music just shifts the focus or gives the brain something else to hang on to and makes it easier to just push through. It helps build that mental strength I always think I don’t have. When running outside it’s easier to distract yourself and keep going. In our little exercise room I am finding other ways, music is clearly one but facing the Dopey medals on the wall helps to motivate to work just that little bit harder, facing the generic medal hanger with everything else on serves as a reminder that I can do this and sometimes watching the birds come and go to the bird table on our back fence is a nice distraction.

About half way through the workout I decided I didn’t feel quite right in my vest. I have been doing my workouts in shorts and sports bra but I only have one pair of shorts so today had cropped running tights on and initially felt odd without an actual top. But half way through I ditched the vest. It wasn’t uncomfortable or anything, it was just that I was in my wonder woman zone. It’s that zone, often but not always exercise related, where I am working really hard but with absolute certainty that I can do it, that there is nothing that can derail me from what I am doing and that what I am doing is right. It’s that being unfuckwithable that I’ve talked about before but that feeling/ state of mind comes after having completed something in the wonder woman zone I think. It’s all nonsense really but I still think there is something really powerful about exercising just in shorts/leggings and sports bra. I don’t care what I actually look like doing it. That’s so totally not the point. It’s about how I feel and when I am gritting my teeth to get another push-up done (off my knees, people, off my knees, don’t get excited) or trying to suck in the oxygen to go full sprint on the spot for the last 10 seconds while Dolly reminds me to pour myself a cup of ambition, then anything more than a sports bra just spoils the vibe. Like I said, wonder woman zone.

Wonder woman zone and medal inspiration from a few days ago. Didn’t think to take a picture today.