Last night, at my usual Tuesday evening running group, I did something I haven’t done in a surprisingly long time. I pushed myself. Hard.
It wasn’t a new session, although it was one of my favourites: hill training on the zigzags. The difference was all in me, driven by having left the house full of pent up frustration at life in general, and in desperate need of an outlet. Again, this isn’t new. I have known from the moment I first started to run that my primary driver is my own sanity; that I need to run in order to keep myself on an even keel. This was linked to speed when I first started running, mainly because I didn’t have much time to run, and needed to squeeze in as much distance as possible. In recent years, however, I have interpreted this need as a need for movement, for a change of scene, for an escape. And that interpretation has had a dramatic impact on how I train.
This change very clearly began in lockdown, when running was the only way to fulfill my need to escape the city. I still watched my pace, but distance steadily took over as the more important statistic. Then, perhaps inevitably, came injury, a stress fracture that put paid to all my planned escapes. Recovery was slow, yet somewhere along the line recovery quietly slid into training again as I prepared for my first ultra marathon. Everything was about distance and endurance, pushing myself hard to keep going, and then keep going some more.
In many ways, endurance training was ideal. I had the perfect reason to go on long, beautiful runs where I told myself I needed to learn how to take it slowly, how to stop and refuel, how to walk when I needed to yet still be able to turn the walk back into a run. What I realised last night is that whilst all of that was true, it was also an excellent cover story to hide the fact I was taking the pressure off. If I had to learn to push myself to keep going all day, then clearly I had to focus on not breaking myself by pushing too hard.
I have a deeply ingrained fear of breaking myself. The mental list of responsibilities combined with the ‘what if I can’t . . . ‘ narrative pulls me up short every time. I’ve known this from day one of starting to run, and told myself it was part of adult life: compromise, cutting corners, being content with good enough. Every now and then, with enough safety measures in place (husband at home with the kids, running friends around me if something went wrong, not too far from home), I could give pushing myself a go, and it always felt amazing. But as life has become more complicated, I tell myself I’m too tired to push; just take it easy and enjoy the run, it’ll do you good, and you can’t risk another stress fracture. And it does do me good. Up to a point.
What I had forgotten is that pushing towards our limits doesn’t mean we get close to them. It means that those limits get pushed further and further back. The things I’ve been scared of were still there last night, but I stopped listening to them, and listened instead to what my body could actually do. I let myself push hard, let my mind empty of everything except the physical sensation of running as hard as I could. And I wasn’t broken at the end, I was fizzing with life and strength.
It’s early days still. Yesterday I had my security net tight around me: close to home, knowing the boys were looked after, and with the awesome Run Grangetown team for company. But I’ve started to realise that pushing myself hard doesn’t have to leave me broken; done right, it leaves me with my limits pushed further back and my world of possibilities widened. After months of worrying that I was going backwards in my training, it seems that all I needed to do was give myself a good, hard push. That is incredibly empowering, and is exactly the motivation I needed as these dark evenings start to draw in.
I Run Free 