So. Given my tendency to overshare on social media, I thought I’d give my blog first dibs on this little tidbit….

Not too long ago — months, rather than years, and single figures in terms of how many — I was barely fit to walk to the playground at the back of my daughter’s school to pick her up at the end of the day. Anyone who knows where we live will know just how short a distance we’re talking about here. I have ongoing issues with iron absorption, B12 absorption, and all-things-autoimmune. That’s another story for another day. #funtimes

Anyway, fast forward… A few months and an iron infusion later, and I was still not very active, but getting thoroughly fed up with my sedentary state of affairs. Basically, I needed to get my act together.

If nothing changes, nothing changes…

I started hearing about various people I know following the Couch to 5K programme. Immediately I was thinking stuff like this:

• Sure, I can barely walk the length of myself, never mind run!
• I haven’t ran since I was in school — come to think of it, I don’t think I even ran then if I could help it!
• People say they only ever run for a bus — I’d just catch the next one!
• I could never do that in a million years, sure I’ve got asthma, cardio sucks. Etc etc.

I started finding excuses not to look any further — my two main excuses being that I hate being out in the rain (and in N.I. it rains pretty much all the time **), and that I was too self conscious and didn’t want people looking at me.

Next thing you know, a lovely friend posted on Facebook that she was halfway through Couch to 5K and that she was doing it on a treadmill. Honestly, I had never even considered that as an option! That’d knock my two excuses out of the way in one fell swoop. Then I spotted a local news article about another lovely friend’s husband and his amazing achievement through following Couch to 5K….

It took me another few weeks trying to talk myself out of buying a treadmill, convinced that it’d be an expensive clothes horse by the end of the first week, and sure where would we even PUT IT?!?!? I found one on Facebook Marketplace about a month ago — traipsed over to the middle of nowhere to collect it, realised it was BLOODY MASSIVE compared to what it had looked like in the photos (because I have no spatial awareness, evidently), was too embarrassed to turn round and drive home without it, and had a big drama (and buyer’s remorse for a while) getting it into the house and all set up. It’s taking up space in our not-exactly-massive living room, and a rule has been put in place that if a week goes by where it hasn’t been used, it’s going back on Marketplace because we Do Not Have Room For A Clothes Horse.

I started Couch to 5K the next day.

WELL. The whole point of the story. After struggling with running for even 60 seconds at a time in week 1, struggling even more with the step up to 90 seconds in week 2, and insisting I was going to have to repeat week 3 because I could barely manage 3 minutes and it was wanting me to step up to 5… I kept on plodding through, and realised that a huge part of this was mind over matter.

Yesterday morning I got up and completed Week 5 Run 3: I ran non-stop for 20 minutes for the first time in my life.

I was simply buzzing all day. Never in a million years did I think I’d run for that length of time, let alone enjoy it. (Well… some of it.) Granted, one woman’s run is another woman’s power walk, and I’m not going to win any prizes for speed — but I RAN.

I still have a way to go to get me to Week 9 Run 3, and then I’ll have to start working out how to move all this OUTSIDE (and have people, God forbid, LOOK at me… and probably run in the RAIN….) but that has moved from “never in a million years” to “sometime in the near future”.

A couple of months ago, I wouldn’t have even gone for a walk down to Main Street and back (probably less than a mile round trip) because I’d be afraid of being too exhausted to make it back home. I know it’s likely that my iron levels will start to dip again soon enough, but I’m going to enjoy this journey while I can, and hopefully have built up a certain level of fitness that I’ll be able to keep going with in the peaks and the troughs.

As I said, it’s mind over matter, and it’s amazing what we are capable of when we put our minds to it.

If nothing changes, nothing changes…

(But I want to…)

** The irony that I’m typing this in the middle of a week long heatwave is not lost on me.