Those early days of training were excruciating and monotonous and humbling. I often felt overwhelmed as I fought to organize time to do it among work and the children and the daily chores. But it was also the best thing that had ever happened to me. I had a sense of purpose and achievement and a project to be proud of that was mine.
Then somewhere in the weeks around Christmas that changed. I stopped running and I stopped writing about it — by now my blog about life with Grace had attracted a decent number of regular readers. It would be easy to say that it was simply due to the busy time of year, but the break was less to do with the busyness of family activities — the tending to clamoring, hyped-up children that makes the Christmas holiday so particularly unrestful — and more to do with a sudden queasiness that descended whenever I contemplated either activity.
That holiday I couldn’t bear to go near the fridge, the source of my discomfort, which hummed carelessly away as though unaware of my torment. It wasn’t the groaning shelves of baked meats and ripe cheeses inside that provoked my biliousness, but my training plan, pinned up on the front by an array of colorful magnetic letters. I had abandoned it.
Outside the weather was iron gray and hard cold. The tail end of the month, the last gasp of the year. There was a sense of judgment all around: newspapers, television, and online media were full of lists of what had been good and bad in the last twelve months, who and what had succeeded and failed; assessments with the benefit of hindsight confidently outlining past events with a view to foretelling the next. Amid their chatter I judged myself and I found myself wanting. I was a hypocrite and a dissembler. After weeks of extolling the life-changing and life-affirming joys of running with the zeal of the converted I had suddenly stopped running.
And I wasn’t quite sure how it had happened.
At first I was under the weather and eased off. Then I was just exhausted, so indulged in a short break. My routine felt overwhelming, so Amelia changed it. Then came a busy period at work for my husband, who notched up so many late nights in his office that it was impossible for me to leave our home full of sleeping children.
Then there was a terrible, terrible treadmill session, when my legs felt like they did not belong to me and would not move to my will, and my throat and chest burned with the effort and still I missed every time target for every mile on my training plan for that day.
Soaked in sweat and dismay I thought: this is no longer what’s helping me to keep going. It has become another task, another project to juggle along with all the other demands on my time, and another yardstick by which to measure my failings.
We are good at this, we women. In particular, there is a certain kind of mother who does this. When the job is not quite demanding enough, or when circumstances dictate that it must be downgraded, or even halted altogether, when the kids occupy every moment and their accomplishments, needs and desires rotate further up the list of priorities and the food shop and the laundry and the constant tidying and the to-do lists teeter higher and ever higher, the thing that is yours and yours alone — the whatever it is you do to make time for yourself amid the hubbub — becomes the thing that you do to prove to yourself that you still matter. That you’ve still got it. It becomes the thing that offsets that seam of gnawing constant anxiety, that thread of worry present throughout all the other activities, that voice that says, “Is this it? Can I do more? Did I fail yet?” Thus the joy and the accomplishment of it turn to ash.
So I stepped off the treadmill. I was not running and all I could think about was running. My not-running guilt was particularly toxic because the running was so interwoven with my maternal responsibilities: the act of putting one foot in front of the other had come to represent progress for Grace too, and when I was not doing it I felt as though the process of supporting her had also ground to a halt. But. When I thought of putting on my running clothes, something rebelled and said no, not yet, I’m not ready again yet. On two occasions I managed to get out of the door and jog six miles, which felt like utter fakery. According to the schedule on my fridge, I had missed three sessions of hill sprints, three sessions of interval training, and nearly three of those stomach-churning long runs — I had not completed eleven miles or twelve miles over the last two Saturdays and was struck with fear to contemplate the thirteen miles assigned to the day after tomorrow.
And lo, my body took control of the situation. It succumbed to a thick cold that made my teeth and eye sockets ache, my nose stream constantly, and my legs want no more challenge than that of walking upstairs to bed. Propped against a pile of pillows and huddled under my duvet I shivered, despite the fact that the heating was turned up high enough to make the bedroom radiator groan and clank with effort and beads of condensation trace their way down clouded window panes.
While I hid and waited to get better and to run again, one thing above all else gave me hope. A steady stream of generous donations to my fundraising pot showed me that my family and friends still had faith. Their message that I wouldn’t let them down gave me the courage to believe it myself.
Sophie Walker, 42, is the author of Grace, Under Pressure. She has been a reporter for Reuters News Agency for sixteen years and has worked as a foreign correspondent traveling to Iraq and Afghanistan with Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. She lives in London. Visit her online at http://www.courage-is.blogspot.com or on Twitter @sophierunning. Grace is now 11.
Excerpted from the book Grace, Under Pressure ©2013 by Sophie Walker. Published with permission of New World Library http://www.newworldlibrary.com