In the summer of 2016, at the age of 21, I made a decision to do something that I’d never done before in my life. I was going to attempt to be healthy. A mixture of a bad diet and having a very generous Indonesian friend who was happy to pay for cabs back from the library, left me coming home from my second year of university in somewhat of a waddling fashion.
I had always been on the bigger side, but this was a new high point for my weight and my already low self-esteem was being crushed by the unbearable load that it was now carrying. To counter this I took up running and DDP Yoga, and by the time I returned to university at the start of my third year I was the healthiest I had ever been.
For the next three or four years however my weight and health bounced around like a kid on a pogo-stick. At this point I’m leaving a gentle reminder to myself to check if pogo-sticks still exist knowing full well there are probably bars in Shoreditch where you can rent them out and play basketball with them. So yeah, my weight fluctuated a fair bit. Enter covid.
Oh lockdown one, the original and possibly most harrowing of the lockdown trilogy. So many sleepless nights, so many endless stares into the void. So little time outside, so much time eating food that was attempting to kill me.
I gained a lot of weight during lockdown one.
At the start of 2022 I decided to rectify this and delved back into the world of DDP Yoga.
Now considering I really struggled to keep up a healthy diet during these months – after all, pancake day, Easter and my birthday all happen in the first quarter of the year, and a man is only human – I managed to lose 18 pounds (8 kilograms) during this period.
With another 10 pounds to lose before I hit my 2 stone target I realised that there was something missing from my new routine. The DDP Yoga was great, as was all the walking I was doing, but neither gave that little boost of dopamine-serotonin induced feeling that I always got with running.
Hands down my favourite thing about running has always been the way it makes me feel. There’s something about running that just releases the happy into my body. I know full well there are probably forms of exercise out there that won’t do as much damage to my knees, are better for weight loss, and give a more balanced workout, but nothing compares to the way running makes me feel.
So last week I laced up my brand new luminous green trail running shoes and hit the track, or rather, hit that bit of grass that isn’t too far of a walk from my house. I’ll be honest, being my first run since 2019 I didn’t exactly go hard. Deciding to follow a four week programme to get me back up to running 5k comfortably means my first two runs were very easy going interval sessions. It was the third run of the week, a distance run coming on Sunday where I knew the feeling would come back good and proper.
It didn’t quite work out like that. Come Sunday – beaten down by a heavy cold, annoying cough and nagging headache – I spent the morning snoozing through several alarms before going to work and ignoring that third run altogether. Meaning at the start of week two of my four week programme I already had to restart from week one, but this turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
It was this run, this easy going interval run that I had also run the week before, where I felt it for the first time since 2019. That feeling. That boost. That amazing something that running sends through your body and into your brain. That morning should have been my fourth run of the programme, it was mathematically the third, and it was technically the first, but it was clear that it was the one where my body and brain got together and understood what was happening.
All My Worst Work 