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| Flying the Flag at MDS 2017 |
Here is Chapter 12 of my next book 'Reborn to Run' in its second edit. I'd be interested in knowing what you think. So here goes...
This song is by the English band Electronic formed by Bernard Sumner, vocalist of New Order and Johnny Marr guitarist of the Smiths. Being released at the very time when I was at my lowest point made it a kind of 'Realisation Anthem'. The lyrics spoke to me about 'Living and Dying' and the truth of the matter was that the message simply wasn't getting through and registering in my clouded alcohol and nicotine infected necrotic world. As for not knowing where to begin, well that line still rings in my ears some thirty years on. Today, the balance of Sumner's lyrics and Marr's music makes for perfect listening for a time long ago but not forgotten.
It's a shame it took me so long to get the message. I wasn’t always like I am now. In fact, when I look back at why and how my life has changed, I realise that at one point in my life, like many of my clients, I was in living in a massive, out-of-control nosedive. Where luckily before I hit rock bottom, I managed to pull out of crashing into oblivion, in the nick of time.
I didn’t rise and soar majestically like an eagle - I just about managed to save myself and level out. It’s a feeling we all experienced during the COVID-19 epidemic. Our very existence was challenged, people’s livelihoods were wiped out in a moment and as a nation we were stripped back to the basics.
The basics being to stay indoors. Not to mix with other people and work from home whilst the Government’s boffins endeavoured to find a vaccine and the National Health Service found a way to cope. We were all challenged and put into level flight. People’s lives were put on hold in a hope that a more ‘normal service’ would be resumed as soon as possible.
Similarly, during my own nosedive, all those years ago, I realised that I couldn't fix things in a moment I had to find an antidote to my situation. The problem had become too overwhelming as there was too much that I didn’t like about myself. However, I felt if I stopped the drinking, the smoking and went on a diet, I might be able to assess my other short comings. I would put myself into a period of suspended animation where I could put things right and then discover what and where I was going for the rest of my life.
It echoed my starting point. My ‘Point Zero’. The point where things couldn’t possibly get any worse. An embarrassing ‘Personal Rock Bottom’ where the only way I felt was up.
My predicament wasn’t a quick fix. All I could do at first was to imagine a brighter future. It became the most important part of the fresh mindset that I needed to adopt and understand.
Certainly, with my own alcohol addiction in the 90’s - and then again when I had Guillain-Barré Syndrome in 2016, I used the same mindset to stop myself from crashing. It didn’t immediately fix either situation but instead parked the problems whilst I searched for an escape strategy. A stabilisation period that would provide the perfect opportunity for personal reflection and personal honesty.
So much of our time is spent inventing excuses when things go wrong, when there’s only ever one person to blame - yourself. You’re a victim of your own choices and whatever predicament you find yourself in, is of your own doing in one way or another. It sounds harsh, but it’s true.
It’s actually a combination of poor timing, poor choices, and coincidences. However, in life the planets hardly ever line up. We are all aware when they do and we’ve all been in situations where everything’s looking rosy, where business or relationships are firing on all cylinders, only to find out that it goes on to fail for one or all of the above reasons.
In our daily lives we tend to only plan for success - we never plan for failure. As a nation we are happy to insure over 30 million cars in the UK every year yet only 11% of people have private health insurance. My belief is that your health is your wealth and without your health, you have nothing. Paying to jump the queue is a no-brainer, yet most people won’t do it. Possibly because they can’t afford it and they don’t see the value in it, or they think it’s unfair to queue-jump others. However, when the chips are down, we’ll all wish we’d invested as it can be too late to give the problem to an already overloaded NHS and wait in line to be fixed before it’s too late.
‘If only’ is a hard life-lesson indeed.
But that’s what happened during COVID? We found the nation couldn’t cope, because 50,000+ people a day were becoming ill and as a result, other people with serious illnesses didn’t get seen.
What I propose instead is to manage your own destiny. I believe we tend to spend too much time thinking about what’s missing and what’s going wrong rather than thinking about what you want to happen.
Question yourself. What are you doing? Where are you going? What’s holding you back and stopping you from getting the foundations in place. That’s the hardest part to get right. It's about getting everything in its right place. But where do you start? It’s easy if all the building blocks are laid out with an easy-to-follow set of instructions but ‘Life’ is a different kind of DIY project.
Imagine a huge set of dominoes lined up ready to be toppled. There are thousands upon thousands laid out and all you need to do to complete a very satisfying toppling is to set the first domino in motion.
Unfortunately, there’s never enough time to get all of one’s dominoes lined up as there are always distractions. Therefore, the problems never get resolved. However, if we break it down into two or three dominoes at a time problem and knock those over, we can start making progress and stop the delaying procrastination. Eventually this way, all the dominoes could be toppled.
It doesn’t matter if the direction you take isn’t quite right or things aren’t happening at the right speed, at least you’ve started. There’s nothing worse than 'I’ll do it later’ or ‘I’ll start tomorrow’ or even worse ‘I can’t be bothered'. For heaven’s sake, my message is ‘JUST GET STARTED!’
You don’t need flashy trainers to go for a run and you don’t need to join a gym. You can start running from your front door. I know that, because that’s what I did - I knew there was something missing, a void in my life where I needed to run to find out what the ‘missing’ was.
I felt my ‘missing’ was ‘achievement’ and that became the focal part of my mindset. I wanted to achieve the self-satisfaction that accompanies achievement. And part of that achieving was doing things to the best of my ability.
When I went for that first run, I didn’t set out to run more than 1,000 marathons or set multiple Guinness World Records or run across deserts or even write books. I was looking for structure. An 'exoskeleton', if you like, to hang the rest of my life on. A structure in my shaky, chaotic world.
It’s about being driven and finding out what drives you on. That’s down to two different personality traits perhaps and whether you are ‘reward’, or ‘experience’ driven.
Let me explain the difference. I’ve run all those marathons and have an enormous number of medals from doing them, yet they’re tucked away in a shopping bag in the loft. They’re not on show as I’m not reward driven, I’m experience driven. So, if I didn’t pick up a medal at the end of a race, it wouldn’t matter, what does matter is that I’ve got the memories of an achievement that will live with me forever.
These achievements are etched into my DNA.
I’m very much experience driven - whereas other’s love a medal or a trophy where it’s not the taking part but only the winning that counts. However, I found having an ‘Experience Goal’ really helped me survive.
Finding myself with Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) and thinking, 'I’ve just run the Marathon des Sables and there’s another one in twelve months’ time - can I get fit in time to do it?' That became the driver - a proper ‘Experience Goal’. It became a major part of my recovery method especially as I thought I’d never see the Sahara Desert ever again. Emotionally I was all in.
For me, it's all about the memories, and even the best photo provides just a snapshot of a moment - I have this amazing photo of me running down a sand dune a year on from GBS carrying the Welsh Flag full of life. Yet prior to seeing the photographer I’d felt exhausted and out for the count. When I look at the photo, my sense of pride shines out, yet I can assure you only a few metres prior to the snap, I was struggling to make a slow walk and felt totally broken.
I’d decided to go back to the Marathon des Sables, in 2017, as a kind of experiment just to see if I could do it. An experiment without instructions or any previous experience as a reference of how to complete ‘The World’s Toughest Footrace’ whilst recovering from an obscure neurological syndrome. The only guide I had was ‘Coleman Gut-Instinct’.
My thought process went along the lines that life doesn’t come with a handbook and the best judge of any predicament is yourself. I mean, no one tells you when you’re born just how easy or hard life is going to be; we just find out along the way.
My initial recovery thoughts were a case of, 'Wow I’ve been in shit a few times, but not as never as bad as this before’ and when you’re lying there paralysed in a hospital bed literally in your own body fluids, I felt I needed to gather my thoughts and emotions to try and discover a solution.
Never in my mind did I think, ‘Why me,' and I always envisaged that things would return to normal.' At the time anyone looking in might have thought, 'Hmm, I’m not so sure.' But then I didn’t have any negative thoughts about my recovery outcome when I was ill - the only thing I was mad about was being stuck on 976 marathons for over five months.
I recently saw a photograph on social media of someone wearing their 2016 Robin Hood Marathon medal. I just thought, 'Ah that’s the one that got away.' My thousandth - the ‘marathon that never happened’. It illustrated to me that life's not this fantastic easy ride. Life bites back. Things happen. People happen. Illness happens. Shit happens. You’re simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and when it does go wrong, what are you going to do about it?
Become a victim? Listen to the Energy Vampires? Become Super-Negative?
You know, a few people thought I faked my illness saying 'There’s nothing wrong with you. You are just doing it for self-promotion purposes.' Can you believe that? The negative attitude towards me was interesting and only fuelled my attitude of recovery. I just dismissed the blast of Kryptonite and started thinking, 'How on Earth am I going to get better?’ And if I’m wanting to be seen as this amazing ‘Lifestyle Coach’ and can’t fix myself, then I’m in the wrong game.'
My thoughts were ‘Onwards. The only way to look is ahead.' And maybe this was of my own doing. Maybe my condition was a result of running all those marathons – I mean, my immune system must have been shot. Who knows? But then, so what, it was done, and I couldn’t change it however much I might have wished.
What I could do, was to start shaping the future and begin breaking down the ‘Everest’ of getting better that lay ahead. We often regard problems as mountains and although everyone’s Everest might be of a different height, mountains are there to be conquered.
If your ‘Everest’ is alcohol addiction, well it’s a tricky climb as there’s only a 1 in 4 chance of a ‘Cold Turkey’ sobriety success. However, when people work with me the 25% becomes more of 90% success, as it’s the mindset and accountability that I project that helps provide a vision for people to see where sobriety can take them.
With my own addiction, I never thought about stopping drinking being a lifelong adventure. I just thought about it being a bit of a one-day at a time kinda effort.
And that's my mindset in general, live the day. Break it down into, what are you doing today? What are you doing in the next hour? What are you doing in the next ten minutes? One step at a time.
If you break it down, you’ll survive.
When you can and can do it consistently, you’ll find the pain and the negative thoughts diminish. The addiction goes and the grief will go with it. There’s suddenly light at the end of the tunnel and the world starts to become a brighter place. And when good things start to happen or someone pays you a compliment, that’s an even bigger reason to try even harder.
1,163 Marathons - 273 Ultras - 16 MDS - 9 GWR - 1 Life
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