The next few years saw a strange disconnect between the running I wanted to do, and the running I actually did. I maintained my Bay loop distance, even managed to push it a little further at times, but not by any significant mileage and I certainly wasn’t adventurous in my route choices. Yet in my head, I wanted to run in the mountains.
I got there occasionally. Sometimes with friends who would take me out on trails or in the hills, and every now and then with my husband, if we were staying with one set of parents or another and had the opportunity to leave the boys for a couple of hours. So these were the runs that mentally kept me going, something to aim for. If I could just maintain my running in Cardiff, I’d be able to do a run of some description in the hills when the opportunity arose.
Only in the last 18 months has that key phrase actually hit me. To have someone ‘who would take me out’. Why did I need someone else? I ran on my own nearly all the time, yet when it came to doing what I really wanted to do, I relied on someone else to get me there, to do the planning and thinking for me. What on earth was going on?
Back to my old friend, confidence. I usually projected this away from the running and onto the driving. If I wanted to go somewhere interesting, I would have to drive there. I wasn’t a very confident driver and hated parking, so narrow roads and tight parking spots weren’t an option. How would I manage to drive home if I’d run hard? What if something happened and, horror of horrors, I was late for school pick up?
Excuses are very easy to create, much less so to work though. Something really big has to happen to open the eyes onto what is actually going on. In my case, that process started with the death of my father. As the terrible, all-consuming grief of the early weeks started to change, I found myself in a near frenzy of needing to get out and about, to do things as if life was normal again. One of those things was to go to a community event in the local park, where I saw two people standing next to a stall for a social running group. I kept them in my sight for a little while, then found that there was no one else there as I walked past them on my way out. So I stopped, and said hello.
You can find out how that changed my life in this post here, suffice to say that every other aspect of my running improved until, having never entered a race, I found myself signing up for Marathon Eryri. The training for that race changed everything.
I Run Free 