Why I am a runner

When god made me, it was not running he had primarily in mind. Belly dancing, making love, having children, ridings horses, maybe even power gymnastics, yes. Athletics - not so much. I found sport at school indescribably tortuous, where leggy pre-adolescent peers (I hit puberty unreasonably early) sailed past me in both the literal and figurative sense. I was a bookworm, and sport, the domain of the male or the thin, was a world from which I was definitely excluded, and those who were in it let me know that. My failings in these areas I knew let others down too, on the hockey pitch or the circuit. So I welcomed with open arms the day I left school and turned my back on the sports field and the athletics track forever.

When I was in my third year of university, the crippling depression that had been hanging over me for most of my life finally gripped me in its icy fingers and pulled me under. I read things about depression all the time, but they never tell you what it actually feels like. Let me tell you. To me, it feels like slow, unending drowning. It is waking up in the morning and clinging to the first few seconds when you've forgotten anything is wrong, and the wave of despair when you remember everything is so wrong it can never be right again. It is rocking in the corner sobbing because the world looks so distorted by your own misery and hopelessness you don't recognise it. It is feeling utterly isolated from humanity and like eating anything or putting one foot in front of the other is physically impossible. Some days it is the cold absence of any feeling other than nausea. It is staring helplessly unable to communicate all this to the person telling you to pull yourself together.

I had episodes throughout the year, much of which I don't remember. I got a degree. I got a temp job which turned into a longer job which turned into a highly pressured, exciting full time job. Somehow from somewhere I pulled the ability to perform well at work. The depression subsided, then my job ended when we lost the campaign we were working to win, and I was pushed into an admin job. The depression found room to come back. I was angry and hopeless by turn, I would have regular crying breaks at work where I would sit in a bathroom cubicle and cry silently pools of tears onto the floor which threatened to drown me, like Alice. I had a tumultuous and destructive relationship. It ended, I found myself almost friendless and almost homeless, I had a miscarriage, I hit rock bottom.

I saw a doctor and she made me come back to see her twice a week, just to talk and talk. She prescribed me some medication. I was still frequently considering knocking at deaths door, begging for relief. One day for no particular reason I got onto the dreaded treadmill at the gym and ran for four minutes. It didn't feel nice. Later that week I ran six. Then ten. Fifteen. Twenty. Every extra minute became a milestone, a victory. I would get to the gym, put my headphones in, climb onto the treadmill and run away from my head. It was painful, it was hard. Like I said, I am not built for running. More than that, I would notice every day that my mood was better, that I felt almost happy sometimes for hours after running.

Gradually I persevered and week after week, month after month, the number went up until I was running for an hour at a time. Its totally addictive - once you start beating yourself, you have to do it again, and again, and again. You dream about the treadmill. You start looking at long, flat roads wistfully. It's weird. An hour probably doesn't seem that impressive to some of you. But to me it sounds like a hundred miles. Because I couldn't run five minutes when I started. Because it gave me some space from the screaming agony of my mind. Because on that treadmill I am another person - I am an athlete.

It gave me a reason to live, to get back on that treadmill and chase the miles, to feel the comforting beat of my feet on the rubber, the glorious ache in my thighs, the sweat that would run down my neck and the steady pump of my heart telling me I was still alive. I feel a great affection for my imperfect body at this point, for its strength and its endurance. I feel the rush of endorphins, of adrenaline, I feel my hear soar and take flight.

That's why I'm a runner. I'm not very fast or particularly good at it. But I never give up, I never compare myself and I never fail to win. Because every day I am still here, I'm still fighting for my life.