I’m more robust than I once was. I managed to give blood on Monday, something that my 20-year old self - a slip of a thing - could only get halfway through before feeling faint and needing to stop. I was more concerned then with being skinny than feeling alright, which is a tiresome way to exist, if you actually want to get anything done. I eat properly now, and I ate iron-rich foods in the weeks leading up to giving blood, and I drank plenty of water. I felt light afterwards, but not necessarily light-headed. I was offered to hold my own bag of blood, which I did, and then I dashed through an impromptu storm to get home.

I’m heavier than I’ve ever been at the moment. I can’t even pretend it’s muscle mass, given that my muscles have atrophied: my normal levels of activity were severely disrupted by being hit by a speeding car in March. I’m not very comfortable with being bigger as a result, but I am comfortable with being alive and well. On balance, it’s fine. Being strong and healthy enough to be able to give blood - something that will save a few lives - is a fair trade, too. I hope I’ve given a life back to the universe after mine was so luckily, miraculously spared.

Relatively recently, elite Canadian ultra runner Marianne Hogan put a post on Instagram about receiving comments about her body shape and size. This wasn’t even a “body positivity” thing, it’s just wrong and shocking. Someone had accidentally replied to one of her Instagram Stories saying that she’d put on weight over the winter (“which is actually good news for me because it tends to keep injuries at bay,” said Hogan), and at a track session, someone told her she runs fast “for someone my size”. Hogan went on to say, “for someone who wears XS? Gee, thank you so much.” If you’re familiar with Marianne Hogan - her extraordinary strength, speed and resilience - the whole thing is deeply saddening and worrying.

I’m not going to talk about her body here, that defeats the purpose of what I’m trying to say, I will only say that she should not be receiving these comments. No one should. She has lined up at the Western States Endurance Run this weekend as one of the favourites to finish in at least a podium position. She came 3rd last year. She came 2nd at Canyons 100k that year too. 3rd at UTMB the year before, 2nd the year before that, after coming 3rd at Western States again. In fact, has she ever not-podiumed at either of the most competitive ultra marathons in the world? Has she ever not been a completely dominant force to be reckoned with? And people want to comment on her body?

I suppose it all just resonated with me because I feel self-conscious at the moment. In a world where people don’t look at a normal body and think it should be slimmer, I could simply be glad that my body is doing all the amazing things that it needs to do. I’m building up my running distance every week and recovering fine. It’s doing all that, while still healing a massive scar on my leg, and dealing with a really stressful week of too much work in too much heat, and too many tasks outside of my comfort zone. It’s hard to sleep, it’s hard to breathe, and my body is like, “Oh, and you want to go for a run? You want to cycle home in the 34-degree heat? Alright, lets do that too.”

I saw a young hare on my run on Thursday morning. I was doing mile reps, not having a very nice time, and saw a little puff of brown in the grass. I thought it was a rabbit - I thought I wouldn’t be so lucky as to see a hare - but then I noticed the tail was hare-like. I was walking on a 3-minute recovery, but as it bounded away, I broke into a jog. I chased the hare - yes I could see now, a leveret - and we stopped together further up the road. The leveret bounded around my feet, running up and down the road, puppy-like in its curiosity, seemingly unbothered by me. It seemed to be seeking the best way through the grass, the hedge and into the fields, but really I’m not sure. All I knew was that I was extraordinarily lucky, this was really special, and that my mile reps didn’t matter anymore.

The leveret bounded back past me and into the grass and was safe. I was left standing dumbfounded in the middle of the road, reeling from the magical, profound encounter, unsure how to proceed with anything at all. If you’re into this sort of thing, nothing matters after experiencing it. For the rest of the day I felt like that was all life needed to be, all the rest was noise. This has both a positive and negative effect: you feel enlightened, but in reality, you still have to turn knots on a factory line like you’re in a Charlie Chaplin film.

My mile reps felt slow, my shorts kept bunching up, my thighs were chafing. Jogging home was uncomfortable. I felt large and ungainly and the heat definitely didn’t help. But the hare didn’t seem to mind any of that. The hare came right up near to the scar on my leg, and I felt seen. I know this was just my own perception of the situation now, not substantiated by anything real, but I felt like it understood something about me. I felt part of something other, elsewhere, here. I have only had similar encounters a handful of times - seeing an owl has a similar effect - but it always seems to fully ground me, like a hug from a parent. And just like that hug, the moment comes to an end, and the creature seems to say: good, now continue like this. You’re okay. You’re going to be fine. This is all that really matters, and you will be fine.

Maybe it has something to do with innocence. All that noise - stress, work, body ideals - are anathema to the very fact of being alive and part of nature. I may be more robust in some ways, but I still need to be held by the sight of a leveret, we all do. My mile reps will get easier, but only by remaining healthy and fuelling my body properly. As Hogan went on to say in her post, “Fuelling yourself, staying healthy, and respecting your body will always take you farther than chasing an image ever could.” I’m super down with that. I want to run far again. Maybe not as fast as a baby hare, but definitely far.

For a good few hours, if not a whole day. To set off on a route designed by someone who loves the place and wants to challenge and enthral us, wants us to see it as they see it, us all together, en masse, some ahead, some behind, floating through a landscape particular to that day, this weather, these conditions, and it’s up to us - up to me - to make the best of it.

It’s been a stressful few months and I just want some time away, where all decisions outside of eating, drinking and moving have been made for me. Doesn’t that appeal? All I really have to do is get to a start line, and then to a finish line. Without childcare or anything like that to worry about, completing the race is all that is required of me for that day.

I want to flip into that special headspace after an hour or so where everyday gripes and noise go quiet. Everyday, but also global; I have existential concerns, but hopefully not philosophical ones. I’ve been there before: tired and glycogen depleted and thirsty, wondering what friendship really is, what home really means, whether we’re really tethered to anything at all on this whirling mass of rock hurtling through space. I mean more gently existential, more positive, more along the lines of: what a time to be alive and celebrating the miracles of nature! The cleverness of it all, the wonder of being able to move across and through it on my own two feet. The privilege! The gift.

I want a day of that. Of getting tired and finding it tough but finding a way, within and without myself, to get up the next hill, through the next boggy field, or just to the end of the last 5k, to latch onto someone else and to be latched onto and be in it together, pulling each other to our best in spite of each other, in delight in each other, in need of each other, the competitive streak comes through here, I love this more than you, no I do, no I want it more, wanting it all to be over but also never wanting it to end, and then I cross a line that is ostensibly the finish, only by dint if it being marked thus, and I could keep running if I wanted to, but to play the game I’ve signed up for, this is where I stop, this is where I’ve rinsed the last of what I have left, and suddenly everything falls soft.

There must be water, there must be sitting, there is calming the heart and lungs back down. There’s salt-sweat-sting eyes, achey-full-feet, and a sudden onset of stiffness in just about every joint going. But the brain bubbles: thoughts swirl atop bath water in dithering, pale shapes and there’s no hurry anymore, for anything, just eating and resting, while moments of the brilliant big day flash across in images, feelings and words.

And that’s it for a while. I can marinade in that glow for weeks, for months, smiling as I get back into running and begin to wonder about what’s next, but I mainly enjoy what has been.

I was together with all of those people, having our own big days, learning chaotically and viscerally about ourselves and a small part of the world. Tethering ourselves to it, yes, feeling connected to something, yes, perhaps to what is really important, to what’s important to us, to let something we love be the priority for the day. Yes, that’s it. What an absolute luxury. But maybe, sometimes, also a necessity.

Over the past week, I’ve been working on an audiobook about the myths and lies in the health and wellness industry. It’s brilliant, it feels like a relief, and the narrator and I laughed to be able to flush out entrenched beliefs about “inflammation” and “toxins” from our minds. Ironically, we have indeed detoxed from all the marketing that means absolutely nothing, phrases like “aids recovery” and “supports immune function,” vague enough to be legal. But you know what really does those things? We all know, really. Good food and sleep. You cannot cheat it, and you cannot beat it.

I’m seeing a private physiotherapist about my knees, because although I’m running, walking and cycling fine, they’re still swollen from the trauma of the crash. I currently really struggle to crouch down to get something from a low shelf in a supermarket, for example. Although the physio at the hospital said my knees would probably be like that until the end of the year, that didn’t seem right to me. Even if it is right, it doesn’t work with my lifestyle, and I wanted to know if there was anything I could do about it. I feared the swelling would be slowing down my running in ways I couldn’t necessarily locate. I feared I would be doing damage, and I wanted to be sensible about it.

He has a plan, we have a plan, and he even found a bit of scar tissue in my right hamstring that I knew nothing about. It was kind of amazing - he measured the bend in my knees, comparing them, then asked me to stand and briefly prodded the back of my leg. We were chatting away until he yelped, “Found it!” Later, I found it myself, a gristly lumpy bit that stung for me to press it. I love this about physios: you can think you know the map of your own body, and within a few seconds, they can poke the side of a knee or the back of a leg and make you aware of the source of your troubles.

He’s great. I’ve been to him before, he was recommended to me by a friend, I trust him. But in light of recording the book this week, I noted that over the course of my half hour appointment, he referred to touching wood for luck a fair few times. At the time, I went along with it, oh yes, this should be a straightforward process, hopefully we won’t discover any other issues, and touch wood, his diagnosis will be correct. Even in the realms of science, with all of the measuring devices and names of tendons and pictures of the human anatomy on the walls, we’re playfully relying on luck.

It’s just what we do when things are a little unknown, isn’t it. If it could go in a series of directions, we call on luck to make it go the way we want. I don’t believe in luck for this, I want things that I can pro-actively do, which is where we might get swept up in the other direction, and start buying creams and turmeric shots and teas that generically “reduce inflammation”. I was quite close to seeking out any of these, feeling like it would do some good, but then I remembered that none of it has ever actually speeded up a process or made a difference in the past.

So, what am I doing? I’m eating well, sleeping, and drinking water. My water is not ionised, it is not oxygenated, it is not placed outside overnight during a full moon. It’s just tap water. And with time - that other magical treatment that we’re always trying to maximise and hack - and the help of a qualified physio, I trust that my knees will get better.

The Diamond League is back, baby. I love watching athletics, I love following the cast of characters at these events around the world, I love seeing rivals pipped against each other and records broken and the camaraderie of the field events. Last night, it was in Rome, and the men’s 100m race was the last event, following a light display. They turned off all the lights in the stadium, and the athletes were apparently supposed to be spotlit as they came out to take their positions, but this didn’t really happen. Anyway, we definitely saw American sprinter Noah Lyles come out, bouncing around on that bouncy track in bouncy shoes like he could simply catapult himself 100m.

The gun goes, and Noah Lyles is not fastest out of the blocks, it looks like Marcell Jacobs is, but Lyles builds his speed over those short 100m until he’s level with the competition and by the finish line, sure enough, he’s the winner in 9 minutes 88 seconds.

Hannah England pointed out in the commentary that that’s how he won the Olympic games. He got a good enough start, was close enough to the rest of the field, and then withstood the pressure of the last 20 metres. The race is 100m long: You don’t win by getting out of the blocks first, you win by finishing first. So many things are like that, aren’t they. Something about that race execution just struck a chord with me yesterday. When you’re in the middle of pursuing something, it’s easy to feel like others are getting ahead, you’re not where you want to be, and being able to achieve what you’ve set out to do is uncertain. But you have to play to your strengths: get a good enough start, stay close enough to the goal, then withstand the pressure.

And the Diamond League circuit has only really just begun.

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To be honest, yes, it is heartbreaking to run my usual routes and find them so much harder than they were before I was hit by a speeding car. This shouldn’t be surprising: two and a half months of “deconditioning” has actually been 10 weeks of pretty solid cell regrowth and bone healing. But somehow it is surprising. I know I’m insanely lucky to be running at all, to be alive at all, but it’s impossible not to want things back the way they were.

It’s just like recovering from any other injury, and actually, that’s a helpful way of framing it for myself. I don’t know how to recover from being hit by a car, catapulted through the air and crawling out of a ditch. I do know how to build back strength and endurance from an injury, and how to cultivate a mindset driven by coming back stronger, more resilient and evermore grateful. I know how to put money in the piggy bank with every run and make sensible, incremental gains.

It’s just that I haven’t been this weak in a very long time. Hiking uphill and feeling burning in my feet, calves and quads is a sensation I just haven’t felt outside of an ultra marathon since before I can remember. I set out on my run with the intention of hiking the hills, hoping that within a few weeks I’ll be fit and strong enough to run the whole route again, but it’s a shock to find that even hiking is hard. Then the positive self-talk, the reality check: by doing this now, you are well on your way to getting back to where you were. This is the work. It’s only been 10 weeks since the crash, it’s insane you’re managing to do this at all. Gosh, so lucky. And what a beautiful day! What a privilege to get to do this, to feel that ache, to enjoy that ache.

All true.

It takes that much noise to counteract the very real emotional ache near my solar plexus. I am sad about how much muscle I’ve lost that was so hard to gain. I am sad about how long it will take to build it all back, not even to build on top of what I had. I am in a constant stasis between building up and getting knocked backwards again. Constant. Will I even manage to finish the 7 Valleys race in September? 110k in the Lake District, 3981m of elevation gain. I count the months. At least it’s at the end of September, that’s a bit more time. But yes, I think, as I continue hiking, trying to keep my effort and cadence steady, my rhythm honest, I have to be doing this. I can’t fall apart on this hill, I can’t give up, this is exactly where I need to be. How about I try running the last part of the hill? Yes, from that rock up ahead, I’ll run.

And my legs are fine and my arms are fine and my chest is absolutely fine. This hill was never easy before, if we’re really honest: the fitter I got, the faster I ran it, and therefore the effort remained the same, the same as now. I feel a little threat of tiredness, and negativity and fear are such loud, obnoxious emotions, but I talk out loud to myself to drown them out: “You’re amazing. You’re doing so well. Just keep going like this, you’re absolutely crushing it, let’s see if we can run all the way to the top of the road!”

I get to the top of the trail and pass through a gate and annoyingly, I have to stop to wait for a car to manoeuvre out of a driveway. I let it pull away and keenly spring back into my jog. My steps are small and I judge myself harshly, so unfit, so weak, but just as quickly I hype myself up: “You’re doing so well, just hold this, this is perfect and this will get easier.” And yes, I do make it to the top of the road. I bend over double and let myself breathe loud and long. I judge myself harshly for this too, of course, but it’s a hot day. I give myself some grace. I still have 3k to go to get home, but it’s largely downhill, the hardest part is done.

When I tilt back into my run, my watch alerts me to my 10k split, and it’s not nearly as slow as I felt. Perception and reality. This is why I like data. Even if the GPS is inaccurate, the numbers are true to themselves. I really am doing great, I know this to be true, and I want that to be my initial thought when things feel hard. I want to be celebrating being on the hill and trying, not heartbroken and comparing myself to a previous life.

But can I reframe the heartbreak? The grief is a yearning, a goal, a desire. Let’s look at my run up that hill again: what was it that drove me to progress from a hike? Next time I feel sadness, can I celebrate the feeling as an impetus to keep trying, to push myself a little more? It seems a little convoluted, but nothing about this situation has felt straightforward. I’ve always enjoyed a very clean input -> output approach to training: a little longer, a little faster, a little further. Next time, can I start the run uphill from even further down the track?

There will be a day - soon - when it doesn’t all feel so difficult. There will be a day - soon - when I can run the whole of the hill on that route. There will be days when it still feels tough, because suddenly I’m back to running 80k in a week and it’s supposed to feel like a challenge, and there will be others when it just flows, when it’s only a privilege and a joy, a celebration of being a body alive in the world. And in both instances, hopefully I’ll think of now, and be grateful to myself for not giving up. Hopefully, I’ll still tell myself out loud: “You’re amazing, you’re doing so well, this is perfect.”

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I hadn’t done this in ages: plot a route on a map, in a place I don’t know, load the GPX file onto my watch and hope for the best. I’m connecting trails between woods and minor roads, I’m seeking a high point, I’m zooming my eyes out and looking for the best possible loop. Once drawn, I check the distance and the elevation and I might tweak it. I mentally log paths and roads that would give me either a shortcut home or an extension. I step out of the door, I press start.

Last week, I stayed in a house in Cranborne Chase with his family, dithering back and forth across the border between Wiltshire and Dorset. While plotting running routes, seeing so many permissive paths across blocks of green on a map makes me feel fizzy with opportunity, so to give myself some sort of anchor, I fixated on a point of interest near to the house: a statue of the Greek God, Hermes. It looked like it was just in the middle of a field, in the middle of nowhere, and I wanted to know if it really was as random as it seemed. I mentioned it to his family when we were talking about potentially going for a walk, and curiosity about the statue grew, until really seeing it became something of a group mission. Following the route I’d drawn, we set out into sunshine.

The 3.5km it took for us to get to the statue was even more beautiful than I’d hoped it would be. His mum pointed out the sheer abundance and variety of flora in a single meadow, inspiring me to fully see and appreciate it. The views across the valleys were expansive, the sky was so clear, the afternoon so warm, the company so convivial. We ducked under tree branches, hiked over tussocks of buttercups and climbed over gates, absorbing the landscape of our home for the next week. There was so much to take in, and with my navigational skills being thrown a couple of times, it took us a while to actually reach the statue.

But what else is a walk like that for? The statue itself was always secondary, Hermes was an excuse, but when we were starting to flag and starting to worry about getting back in time for our dinner reservation, he became a goal. We put our heads down, and we made it. He really is just a random statue in a semi-random field. The grounds belong to a house, but it looks and feels like a meadow like any other. We took some photos and wandered back. A brief Internet search only really gave me the year the statue was erected. And I like it that way. Yes. I want to live in a world where Hermes is on a plinth several feet in the air, his winged feet painted gold and his body curved in arabesque.

The next day, I ran the loop I had plotted. The trails beyond Hermes included a surprise stream crossing, a fun steep climb through bluebells, and the sort of sloping meadows that beg to be rolled down. Later in the week, I tried to make a new, longer route, using the early trails as a springboard. I used to move house once a year when I lived in London, and each time, this was how I would build my running routes and get to know an area: I’d add on, subtract, move in concentric circles and spiral, until there was a 5k, 5-mile, 10k and 10-mile route to have in the quiver as standard.

When I moved to Wiltshire three years ago, I had to learn how to do this on trails. It’s easy in a city: a road is a road, a path is a path, and if you don’t like it, you turn off and go elsewhere. You don’t have a list of routes you avoid in summer because they’re covered in nettles, nor ones you avoid in winter because they are just too muddy. I’ve got all of that pretty locked in now, and outside of race routes, I haven’t had to work that navigational muscle since then.

So, that longer route I had plotted: I got myself in a right pickle. It all felt very familiar, that mild hysteria between being steeped in frustration and laughing at myself. Nettles are always involved in this sort of palaver, and there are bonus points if you have to pick your way through a field of them twice because the gate you’re approaching isn’t actually the right gate. I still have no idea where my correct gate was, I can only assume that the permissive path has been blocked off. Still, only a couple of stings feels like a win.

I tried to find an alternative route via a gate behind some sheep, but that led me to a fenced off wilderness, surrounded by animal traps which unnerved me, and my only option was to circumnavigate it. I came to a stream, and realised I was only getting myself in more knots, but crossing the stream felt synonymous with getting the heck out of there, so I hopped from bank to rock to bank, then bushwhacked my way up to whatever lay beyond. Ah, a fence around a field. But at least I recognised this field, I could get this run back in motion, but not before scrambling up a muddy bank, grabbing onto the fragile bark of a fallen tree, then climbing over a wire fence that thankfully, wasn’t barbed. Phew.

My adventure had barely even started and I was worried I would have to turn for home. But that’s not what I set out to do. I set out to finish this route, to explore, to see, to know what those blobs on the map looked like in real life. I would adjust: stick to the road for the next section, then take a slight shortcut to the next trail.

And then, friends, I was well underway. And what I found was not what I had been expecting at all: the mid-point was a near-vertical hill out of a village that lead onto a well-used trail between trees and bluebells, up on high, the tops of neighbouring hills now at eye-level. The steepness and then the length of it was well worth choosing to continue, and my earlier frustrations were forgotten. The following bridleway was quintessential English countryside, and a gulley that rose steeply and muddily up through a deep, dark wood was surprising in its relative wildness, and humbling in its vastness. It goes like that sometimes: between moments of what looks like civilisation are tracks that are barely trodden, and maintain that weird, unkempt, gnarly energy that tells the mind to sit back and listen, just listen.

And there, then, I could see the end in sight on my watch. There was only about a kilometre left and it looked like it should be relatively straightforward. I was on the home straight, my legs turning confidently over the hard-packed ground on a nice, wide bridleway and I sent him a voice note - I’ll be back really soon - and as that trail turned to road, and the road tilted up towards our home for the week, I felt triumphant. Magnificent. I had made it. I’d been in unknown territory all on my own, and I had made it through and back, safe and sound, and not too much later than I’d hoped.

I felt different, somehow, in a way that only those exploratory runs can make you feel. You kind of have to be brave. You have to ignore all those voices of doubt and fear. On a tiny scale, you have to look after yourself, and you arrive back to safety having managed to do that. Even when the adventure is this small, trail running invites you to do that. Get lost for a while. Let your mind sit back and listen, just listen.

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Well friends, I hope we’re coming to the end of my Car Crash Recovery series on this Substack. I’ve made plenty of new little notes, incidental thoughts, lines of questioning to pursue, that have nothing to do with being hit by a car while I was cycling home, and that’s really nice. I’m looking forward to sharing them with you.

I’m struggling with sentences at the moment, my brain is doing some kind of post-trauma remapping, some kind of fog, and complete, coherent paragraphs are difficult to form. The only time my brain has felt like this before is after an ultra marathon, so I believe it’s just the comedown from all the adrenaline, stress and exhaustion of the past few weeks. I trust that it will come back. The cast came off my wrist last week, but now I’m trying to pursue legal action, and it’s just a lot to hold. I’m not in my usual patterns. But I wanted to share a small tale from Friday morning:

I’d been awake for hours, but somehow 9am came and went, and with it, the time I should have left to catch the bus to work. I know I did it on purpose. The idea of trying to cycle to work had been lingering in the back of my mind for a week - I’d tried going out on my bike a few days previously, but the wrist hurt going over any sort of bump in the road. But I wanted to try today. My wrist has been getting better rapidly, and last week the doctor’s main concern was that I wouldn’t have the strength in my wrist to react, to brake if I needed to, to grip. I had the strength now, I knew that for sure, it was just a bit uncomfortable. Also, I was starting to feel a ripple of fear about cycling, so I knew I needed to nip that in the bud, before it expanded and escalated. I wrapped my splint around my wrist nice and firmly, put my rucksack on, and cycled off into a sunny morning.

New bike, new smoothness, different posture. But the same push of the legs, strength in the back, firm grip on the handlebars. Old friend, old home, old safe and quiet place between destinations. I would be going my usual route, I would go past the crash site, yes I would. The banks are all covered in cow parsley now, the road looks slimmer with the starburst boughs of flowers. I knew where the exact spot was by the huge gash in the concrete across the middle of the road, the mark I think his car had made after hitting me, before hurling into the hedge on the other side of the road. There are still bits of car scattered around, bits of rubber, bits of bumper. I cycled confidently through it.

Only a couple of metres further along, an oncoming car slowed to a stop to let me pass. This hasn’t happened before - there’s usually enough space for both parties to pass, if everyone is being mindful. I said thank you - a smile and a small wave of the hand - and passed by the car. Why should that happen exactly here, where I was hit, and where so few cars pass on an average weekday morning? And then it happened again: I stopped at the bottom of a hill to let a car come down, but they stopped and waved me through. A smile, a nod, a small wave in thanks.

I feel emotional recalling it. Two cars fully stopped for me, where it’s rare that I should even see one. When I do see one, they usually maintain their normal speed.

Sometimes you can’t not see these things as being meaningful, somehow. I was being welcomed back, I was being told to continue, I was being told that I belong on the roads. I was being told that it’s okay, that the universe is on my side, that this is a safe route after all, that most people are good and careful and kind. Any fear I might have felt about being back there was soothed. I cycled merrily on to work, then I cycled merrily home, excited to complete the return journey, this time.

On running: I’m managing to run up to 10k, now! My muscles get tired, but every run I do is money in the bank to get back to where I was. Spring has been a beautiful time to recover, drawing so much hope from the spectacle of growth and newness around us, and now it’s racing season, and I feel fire. I know I’m only running 10k at the moment, but it’s hard not to feel excited about running an ultra again.

Following Rachel Entrekin’s performance at Cocodona 250 this week - obliterating the men’s course record, and finishing first overall - has been electrifying. the Western States 100 is next month, and the GOAT Jim Walmsley announced that he will be racing, in what was already set to be a thoroughly stout and competitive field. I’ve been closely following Jim’s journey in the sport since I first got into it myself, he is my era, his was one of the first names I ever knew, and I am already paralysed with anticipation. News of the return of the four-time champion and course record holder has been received by those looking to compete with him this year with excitement and joy. This is one of the reasons I love this sport so very much.

As Corrine Malcolm pointed out in an episode of the FreeTrail podcast recently, an edition of these races without a Jim Walmsley, a Courtney Dauwalter or a Katie Schide seems to carry a bit of an asterisk beside the winner’s performance. Even if the course record was broken, and if the men ran under 14 hours, as is expected to happen this year, some (like me) would still wonder what would have happened if Jim was there. The chance to beat Jim fair and square is a heck of an opportunity. Your stature is undeniable then. Some may try to run the race with Jim, will blow up and go down in a glorious ball of flames. Some may try to stay ahead, some may stay close at his heels. But he will undoubtedly be the centre of gravity here. No one knows how to run that race like Jim.

Learning about the Western States 100 is what got me into this ultrarunning mess. I watched those elite ultra runners make quick work of the course and they made it seem possible. I wanted to have a go at running 100 miles. I had a go. It was really hard. But it was indeed possible and I completely loved it. As a fan of the sport, as someone continually aspiring to get better, Western States still holds all of that magic for me. The kernel, the catalyst, indeed, the centre of gravity for me.

I was going to keep this short, on account of my struggling with paragraphs. but dang, don’t get me started on Western States. I know you didn’t start this, I started it…but maybe that’s all I can mentally process right now. Compensation, and Western States. You know what? I’ll take that.

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I have my arm back. Oh friends, I’ve been going pretty mental this week, I’ve been struggling to sleep, struggling to read, really having to work to stay in conversations, stay present, think about anything other than how much I couldn’t wait until Thursday to get the cast off my wrist. It’s really stiff, it’s hairy and twisted and sore and weird, but it’s my arm, and I’m back in sole control of its recovery.

Getting the cast off was symbolic, yes - a line in the sand, from which point onwards, I would be in the next stage of moving on from being hit by a car. But also, oh my god, six weeks is an entire school summer holiday’s-worth of time to have a limb in a cast. I never, ever want to go through this again. It’s felt so long. Mid-March genuinely feels like a couple of years ago. It’s been awful, frankly. Of course, I’m extremely lucky etc., but that doesn’t detract from the fact that it’s been difficult, having my dominant hand so bandaged and awkward. I pride myself on being grateful for my body and what it can do, I am perpetually in awe, but I hadn’t ever considered the beauty of simply being able to touch the skin on my wrist, to feel the breeze against the skin, to be able to scratch it when it’s itchy. To see it - this thing I literally know like the back of my hand - to squeeze it gently and know that it is mine. Yes, I took all of that for granted.

What have I learned from the experience? I’m quite an impatient person, and I’ve learned a new level of patience out of necessity. I wouldn’t say that I am now more patient with things than I was before, I think I’ll spend a lifetime learning patience, but evidently I am capable of waiting. It’s funny, isn’t it, the passage of time is one of the extremely few certainties in life - merrily and relentlessly it ticks onwards, with or without you - and yet impatience implies an element of disbelief. If you just wait, it will come, but being conscious of waiting is hell. The more you focus on it, the slower the time goes. Distraction was key. I couldn’t just sit with it and discover peace. I wanted no room for pondering. I just wanted Thursday, and I was going to let my brain scream all the way towards it.

I can’t tell you how badly I wanted to just pull that cast off myself, go at it with a hacksaw, anything to set my arm free. The wait was indeed a special kind of torture. The drive to the hospital was not my finest hour: I was such an anxious mess, I had to get out of the car before he had even properly parked up, I just couldn’t be that close to the hospital building and wait any longer. I needed to know I wouldn’t miss the appointment. I needed to be as close as I could be to the plaster room, as soon as possible. I had a dream that we’d arrived for my 9:10am appointment and we’d had to wait until 5pm, only for them to tell me the wrist was still broken and they’d need to leave the cast on. I don’t think that dream demands too much analysis to understand its roots.

But by that very afternoon, I’m here, writing this in the park, getting some sun on the skin. I got a very light tan-line from my cast, but thankfully it’s not too noticeable. I’m colouring over it, like everything else.

Since last week, since my madness started, I have been frantically, compulsively clearing stuff out of my house, like a spring clean on steroids. I couldn’t go to bed, I couldn’t wind down, I needed to get up and sort through my books one more time, trying to get the numbers down enough so that they all fitted on my shelves, not spilling over onto the stairs, to piles by the fireplace and on both arms of the sofa. I like a cosy aesthetic, but I’ve since realised that all of this stuff, all these little scraps of paper, electrical items that don’t work anymore, the cables for those items, the box those cables are in, the entire collection of instruction booklets, it was all just noise in my head. I already had so much noise in my head - get this cast off my arm, let me move on with my life, let me have my arm back - being at home with it all was overwhelming.

But even beyond that, the anxiety I once had every time I had to leave the house - kind of embarrassing, actually, shaky hands and shortness of breath because I can’t remember the things I need, worry I won’t pack something I might find I need later, what if I need my hand cream? Where’s that little pebble I like to have in my pocket sometimes? Maybe I should take two books, in case I don’t fancy the one I have - for now, that noise has gone. There’s just less physical information drawing my eye. But I suppose also, after an experience like this, the small stuff just doesn’t matter as much. When I first went to hospital, he asked me if there was anything I wanted from home, and I couldn’t think of a single thing. I just wanted him and my family.

As time goes on, the creature comforts become semi-essential again, I’m sure. But in going through my stuff with such a clear line of thought regarding what I need, what I want and what matters, I hope I now know that forgetting something isn’t the end of the world. I can feel the sun and the breeze on my arm again. Does it get much better than that? I can clean the sweat off it after a run. I can physically touch the greatest possession I will ever have: my own body. No. There’s no material thing I need more than that.

p.s: apologies if, like me, you now have ‘Ain’t Got No, I Got Life’ by Nina Simone stuck in your head. Further apologies if you didn’t, but you do now that I’ve mentioned it.

I had a psychology appointment this week. The hospital schedule these appointments for a few weeks after a traumatic event, so that once you’ve been through all the normal stages of processing and healing, they can see how you’re really doing.

In the appointment, I had a big ugly cry, and talked through all the conflicting feelings I have about feeling lucky but also incredibly unlucky, grateful to be alive, and extremely ungrateful for my present state. I talked about feeling bad about feeling sad, and feeling like I’m letting down all the people who have praised my positivity and strength. I was letting myself down, I needed to do better, I wanted to pretend this never happened and sprint right back into my normal life. The psychologist gave me permission to feel all of these things; she encouraged me to do so. Keep doing things, keep living, but allow yourself to feel sad.

I showed her the scar on my leg. It really is remarkable: given that after the impact the entire front of my shin was blown open (ew, sorry), the surgeons have stitched it back together like a neat little carry-on suitcase, with no bumps, and lovely neat lines. It looks amazing, for what it is, and I marvel at it daily. Lucky, unlucky. I told the psychologist how weirdly proud I feel of it when I’m out running. (I’m back to running! I can run 5k!) I feel proud of the nice pink cast on my wrist. I feel defiant.

The psychologist said that that word - defiant - comes up a lot among the runners, cyclists and triathletes she sees. This surprised and delighted me. We then had a discussion about which comes first: is it the sort of inherent trait that leads us into endurance sports, or is it something we acquire through the activity? We decided it’s probably both, it’s a feedback loop, you start the sport because you want to push yourself, you push yourself and then want to go further, you are defiant against the challenges you present to yourself.

It’s a delicious feeling. Every single step of a run feels like a celebration, like anger, like fire, like nourishment. A horrible thing happened to me and five weeks later, I’m back outside, doing the activity that leads me to mountains, to ultra marathons, to extraordinary depths of physical and mental fortitude. I am proud to show my scar, because it’s an outward declaration of the strength of my bones and muscles, and the body’s magnificent healing powers.

I have been humbled by such sedentary weeks: that 5k is a recent progression from 3k, which was quite a quick progression from a run/walk, and it’s about as far as I’m comfortable with at the moment. I’m cautious not to push it, because as the doctor in the fracture clinic pointed out, my body is still healing, and I don’t want to stress my body in such a way that it detracts from that healing. But this amount of running is giving me so much joy, purpose, fight and sense of my old self, I believe the good chemicals must be helping me out.

This is just as well, because I was feeling pretty low last week. I wasn’t really sure why, other than the obvious: I’m suddenly not doing the things I was hoping to be doing this month. I’m largely at home, which is fine, I’m not bored, and I’m mostly alone, which is also fine. But before the psychology appointment, I kept being pulled into this bizarre feeling of loneliness. Seeing friends definitely helped, but I think the loneliness had more to do with my experience. I’m an introvert, I am not hugely sociable, I love doing things on my own. But I’ve realised now - I think - that the conditions of that contentedness come from feeling part of society, whether I’m engaging with others or not. This experience has made me feel like an outsider, it’s a reference point I can’t share with many others. I’m different: while I’m struggling to do the washing up with one hand, while I’m struggling to lift the lid on the recycling bin, my neighbours are managing just fine.

I think I realised this while I was at Southmead Hospital this week, where I was treated after the crash. I desperately wanted to see the doctors and nurses who treated me when I was there, because they are the people who knew exactly what I had been through. They saw the very core of who I am now, in this slightly new world, and treated me with care and compassion. They are my people, and I cried silly choking sobs when I arrived and when I left the hospital. Does that even make sense? It’s odd, I know. I think the best example I can give in contrast is that when we all went into lockdown at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, we were isolated from each other, but we were all in it together. People were having similar experiences. We all had mutual reference points. I’m in this trauma all on my own, and it is weirdly isolating.

So when I go for my little jogs now, I get a lot of strength from saying hello to other runners. None of them glare at my cast, no one asks why I’m out there with a healing wrist, no one asks what happened to me. We say hello, we say good morning, and that’s it. We’re part of the same community and we understand each other’s experience in that very moment.

Yesterday, I passed by a man running up a hill while I was going downhill. I know how that hill feels, and he probably knows how fun it is to run down it. This is our connection. These people don’t think I’m mad for running with a cast on my wrist, or at least, they don’t show it. I believe they understand. They know how important this hobby feels to one’s sense of self, how much it’s a non-negotiable for nurturing mental and physical health, how irresistible it is on a warm, sunny day in late-April. They went out for a run today for exactly the same reason as I did. My injuries have nothing to do with it.

I’m not low anymore. It was good to talk things through, it was good to philosophise about it a bit with the psychologist, it feels really good to have figured out a probable reason for the lonely feeling. I haven’t experienced any setbacks in recovery from my occasional jogs, so I’m going to keep doing them. And yes, I’m going to slowly build back to where I was before the crash, and although I’ll be back to moaning about hayfever and early mornings and niggles before long, my connection to other runners will remain the same. Good morning! Good afternoon, rather! Oh is it? Oh, how we laugh. And defiantly, we run on

.

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Well gosh, in all that fuss with being hit by a speeding car, I never got to tell you about my run that day. It feels like a lifetime ago, not least because the weather is so drastically different now. Outside is rain and cold, my heating bill is costing a fortune for this quarter, and only a month ago I was running down London streets in a t-shirt with my sunglasses on.

I was working in London that day, so I cycled to the train station in Chippenham dressed in my running kit, then ran from Paddington to Nine Elms, intending to repeat the journey in reverse to go home. I love this route - I go through Hyde Park, kicking into the morning with all the other runners, and always take a moment to look at the Serpentine. Were there swimmers that day? There must have been. I must remember to try to join the club again this year - I have dreams of doing this exact commute, but with a dip in the water before carrying on to work.

I looked in the windows of the shops down Sloane Street - more art than clothes - and wondered at the teenage version of myself who was obsessed with designer clothing, pouring over copies of Vogue, but ultimately falling in love with the longform profiles of actors and models, wanting to be able to ask those sorts of questions of someone I admire, be the person to tell their story, and believing that such a skill would forever be beyond me. I still believe it is beyond me, but somehow I now do it at least once a month, interviewing amazing people in the sport of running. I love writing profiles as much as I thought I would, and I think about my teenage self often, the one who tore out profiles to keep, loving the writer’s voice as much as the answers they drew out.

Thinking about all of this, dodging pedestrians, dodging buses, dodging other runners, is always a stark contrast to the soft glow of Hyde Park. There’s so much to take in, so many half-thoughts, but it’s a thrill. I skipped over Sloane Square with a quick glance to see what was on at the Royal Court Theatre: any of my contemporaries from my theatre days? There was once - someone I used to review theatre with had their name up in red lights. That was nice. It’s best to keep on running, before I wonder too much at what could have been, had I continued to write plays. What could still be? Just get to work for now.

Chelsea Bridge Road is wide and fast. If you get caught in a pedestrian pile-up down there, it feels like a total freak of the universe’s timing. You know when that happens? When somehow, on an otherwise empty street, four people get caught trying to pass by each other at the same time. That’s exactly what happened to me that day. There’s no avoiding it, you can see it coming, and you wonder how it’s even possible. No one else seemed to clock the ridiculousness of the event, so I kept running.

Chelsea Bridge, Selfie Bridge: always someone capturing themselves and the river along here, usually while they’re running. Battersea Park on the other side is a running Mecca - it’s flat, and the road is circular and wide - and that’s exactly where I was heading. For now, I would just skirt down the side of the park, keeping an eye out for any running celebrities doing reps on the road or the athletics track, before turning off towards work. I’d do a full loop later. After a shower, breakfast and my third coffee of the day, I would have a lovely day recording a brilliant book, looking forward to my return trip later.

I had brought a different t-shirt for my run home, a bright pink one I got from the Nike outlet store a zillion years ago, but that is still one of my favourites. It’s extremely durable. It doesn’t even smell. It’s still a fun shade of pink. It had been a beautiful day of sunshine, and a colleague asked how I would be running home as well as running in, and I simply gestured out of the floor-to-ceiling window. He said, “Yes I know, but how?” It was finally here, the return trip. The sunset jaunt. I left a bag of things at the office, lightening my running pack and intending to pick it up when I was back there on Friday. I hesitated to leave it, as I always do - laughingly wondering at some freak occurrence which would mean I don’t come back. I always do this. It’s only strange when it comes true.

I miss my t-shirt dress, I miss my Toms shoes.

I said goodbye to the reception staff and clicked into my run before my watch had found the GPS signal. I wasn’t going to wait. This run was about running, it was about enjoying the city, enjoying the setting sun, the early days of warmer weather. When I entered Battersea Park, I immediately saw a face I know - Rosie, one of the first friends I ever made in my London running club. What a coincidence! Oh, it was so gorgeous to see her. I ran with her and her friend for half a lap of the park, catching up and remarking at the blossom on the trees, before I peeled off towards Chelsea Bridge again. I had such a warm glow from seeing her. What are the chances! Doesn’t the world have strange timing sometimes?

Chelsea Bridge, Selfie Bridge, this time I stopped to take a photo of the sunset over the river. I continued to gawp at it as I started running again, then dodged around someone running with their arm stuck out, filming themselves against the backdrop. The evening was too nice to be annoyed. It was funny, is all.

I wanted to keep running, I wanted to go further, I wanted to be out there for longer, but I had a train to catch. I sat on the steps outside the station to cool down enough to put my coat on, then got myself a sandwich and a hot chocolate for the train. No gin-in-a-tin today. Didn’t feel like it. Odd, I so often delight in getting a little gin for the journey. But no. Today, hot chocolate seemed right. And boy, was I glad of all of that, as the train hit signal failures and a slow freight train outside Swindon, and we ended up being 45 minutes delayed. I messaged him, “I’m so restless. I just want to be on my bike and heading home.”

The next day, when doctors would ask when I last ate, I would tell them about the sandwich and hot chocolate. I would be glad I didn’t have an alcoholic drink, so I would know without a doubt that my reaction to the oncoming car was as sharp as it could have been. I would tell everyone about the fact my train was 45 minutes late. I would try to draw connections in my brain between the weird pedestrian meeting on the pavement, the spooky timing seeing Rosie at Battersea Park, and the delayed train. I was never meant to be on the road at the same time as the speeding vehicle. I was supposed to have been home half an hour before it even happened. Trying to find reasons. Trying to find causation. If this, then what? Leads to nothing. Like seeing 22:22 on the clock, or 11:11, and wondering if something should happen. It happens every day and nothing ever does.

My little running shorts, my lacerated leg, no fabric in the wound. Apologies to everyone for smelling of running. Laughter. Don’t worry at all. My pink t-shirt still on when I video-called mum and dad the next morning - no point waking them that night when really, I was fine - and noticing mud on the front. It’ll wash out. Durable, hardy. Still a fun shade of pink.

The cast on my wrist is pink now. I hadn’t realised this before: it is actually the same shade as my t-shirt. Trying to find reasons, causation, if this, then…nothing.

I loved my run that day. It was one of those really special-feeling ones, where everything seems possible, everyone seems wonderful, when running is a celebration of life. Yes. A celebration of life. That sunset is still so bright in my mind. All the smiling faces on the other runners in the park, soaking it in, the pink-orange glint in their eyes.

Weeks later, a police officer would say that was probably the worst day of my life. But it really wasn’t. It didn’t end as I’d hoped, the delayed train meant it literally took days to get home, but I’d had a lovely day.

I know a lot of people in the world can’t imagine anything worse than going for a run, and wouldn’t want to waste their final days on “exercise”. But if that’s all it is to you, fair enough. Let’s not get too morbid about it, but if that had been my last day, as it so easily could have been, I would be so happy to have got a whopping two runs in that day, two celebrations of my body alive in this world. To feel it swooping through air, to feel air in my lungs, to have complete control over my path through space. To have seen a friend, spent time with a friend, to have shared the park and the sunset with other people who know what it feels like. Yes. No problems there.

I’m not back to running yet - my knees are actually still swollen and I have an angry meniscus. But I should be back to it by the time the cast comes off my wrist. And right now, I don’t care at all what shape my body is in when I take those first strides back, how slow I am or how unfit I feel. I just want to swoop through the air again. I want to put on my shoes, and probably the pink t-shirt, and head out of the door saying, “Now, where were we?” with that sunset in the back of my mind.

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The human body is weird, isn’t it. I can step funny on a rock and sprain my ankle and be out of action for months. I get hit by a speeding car though, and most of my bones and ligaments remain intact, and I’m going out for walks within a week. Also, unlike the ankle sprains, my body is recovering in leaps and bounds every single day. Anyone else who’s sprained an ankle knows how tempestuous they can be - it’s a constant guessing game of how they’re going to react to life from day to day, giving you hope before feeling worse than they have in days. This recovery though, is a constant source of good feeling and triumph. I walk further, my fingers wiggle more, my skin heals. My brain fog took a good week and a half to clear, and to interview someone and write a profile of them in the middle of all of this has been one of my greatest achievements. I don’t know how I’ve managed that.

There were a few days of strops, right in the doldrums of the first flickers of energy returning, but not having the strength, mobility or enough hands to do things. I would easily do too much and completely burn out by 11am, crying because it hurts to put my trousers on. It was all a bit ridiculous, on reflection, and I don’t know how he didn’t just laugh at me. No, he’s a good man, and simply held me, told me it will get easier, and helped me with the fastening on my trousers.

I don’t want to miss these really special first days of spring. The transformation makes me giddy every year, and I’m walking with the same defiant, deliberate, determined stride of a run. I’m looking at blossom, smelling daisies on the breeze, watching trees come into colour. My IT band on the injured side, maybe the left side too, is really grumpy, but I think walking and patience are easing them out. I’m thinking about my nervous system, I’m doing what feels nice, the skin around the laceration on my shin keeps tingling. It’s not sore at all, but I would absolutely compare the tingling to immersion in freezing cold water. Is this the nerves waking up? A week ago, to touch it, I could mainly feel the sensation in my finger. It’s slowly coming back in the shin itself.

I wrote the above section much earlier in the week. I was feeling really positive, it’s nice to read it back. On Thursday, I was expecting to get a lighter cast on my arm and instead they’ve simply put a cast on top of the back-plate and dressing I’ve had on since 19th March, the morning after the incident. It’s literally weighing me down. I can get it changed next week, but I honestly don’t know when I’d have time around all of my other medical appointments. But my arm feels claustrophobic. I’m counting down the days until it’s fully off. 30th April guys, 30th April.

Then, I went home to formalise my statement to the police. It turns out the man handed himself in after there was a media call-out for witnesses (yes, I made the local paper). He likely won’t get a court date for another year or two. I had written my statement, sent it to the policeman and thought that would be it. No: he edited it with extremely blunt instruments, adding in words that aren’t mine and semi-colons I basically never use, cutting out entire paragraphs about my mental health that I’d been advised to include, then asked me to go back over the incident again in all its great, gory detail. The most traumatic part of the whole thing was getting the 9-inch long laceration on my leg cleaned. I never want to feel instruments digging around my bone, ever, ever again. Hopefully, at least, that’s the last time I have to talk about it in such detail.

After a long morning at the Bath Royal United Hospital, feeling angry about the state the NHS is in, feeling like a trapped animal between delays and glaring inefficiencies, I was confronted with an over-worked police force and a massive backlog of cases in the court system. I’d started that day full of joy, showing off my agility to him, literally running up the stairs. I ended it on the sofa having a big rant down the phone to mum. I feel so very powerless. He is encouraging me to just focus on my own recovery, to step back from the things that are making me so livid. For the time being, I think I’ll have to. Stress is stress, and the injustices of the world are not conducive to healing my broken bones and skin at the moment. I am only good for long baths and short walks.

I just want to take a moment to say an enormous thank you to everyone who has sent well-wishes during this time, I can’t even begin to describe how much it helps. To still have flowers in bloom right now - at the lowest point, I hope - is giving me so much strength. People have complimented my positivity, but I can only be so because of the soft landing I’ve had among friends and family. Thank you.

On Thursday night, in an attempt to find solace, I rewatched ultrarunner and coach David Roche’s episode of his YouTube series about the bike accident he had two years ago. I really like this line:

“A year ago today, would I change it? Yeah, I wouldn’t want to get hit by a car. But I love the person who got up from that ditch.”

I got up from the ditch. And I’m slightly in awe of the version of myself who did.

Onwards and upwards, eh. Backwards, sideways? For the time being, I just want to stay still.

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Last week, I was hit by a speeding car while I was cycling home. I have a fractured wrist and a severe laceration on my right shin. I am recovering and healing really well. The main silver lining of all of this has been witnessing the abundant kindness of others - for every colossal turd-head on the earth speeding in an Audi, there are a thousand kind hearts. Thank you to everyone who’s got in touch, it really genuinely has helped my recovery, I am buoyant and happy and motivated to get better every day.

It’s also been wonderful to get to spend time with my loved ones. After I was discharged from hospital, I stayed at my parents’ house for a few days and my sister even came over from Sweden for a visit. It was brilliant to get to share our days together, to rely on them, to share in this big dramatic thing that’s happened to me, to all of us.

The physio who visited me in hospital said they don’t prescribe walking, because patients do enough just walking around the house fetching drinks and going to the toilet. I can attest to that: I was absolutely shattered for the first few days, just from getting up to turn off a light switch or close a door. When I had recovered enough though, with full range of motion back in my legs, I wanted to get out in the sun.

On Monday, mum and I walked to the top of the road and back. The sun was beating down on the tarmac and onto our faces. The walk must only be 200m or so there and back, but it felt like a new frame of mind, we chatted and enjoyed the breeze on our skin and a little stretch of the legs. When we reached the top of the road, I pointed to a lamppost on the path that runs across the top of their road: I told mum that tomorrow, I would make it to there.

Tuesday, more sunshine, but a harsher wind so I borrowed mum’s cosy winter coat. At the time I had a massive fleecy dressing on my leg, so I couldn’t wear trousers, only shorts, and I have very few coats that will actually fit over the cast on my arm. My wardrobe will be limited for the next five weeks or so. I have more streamlined dressings on my leg now, but some of the other cuts on my legs are still snaggy, I don’t want clothing over them. This is just one of many stumbling blocks I didn’t foresee. Clipping fingernails. Turning pages of a book. Taking a lid off anything. Tying up my hair. Turning over in bed. The sheer thought of it all instead of automatic motion is taking up most of my brain space.

Mum and I made it to the lamppost, and then pushed a little further - I made it to the next lamppost on. I was triumphant. This is always a risky game, in running, in walking, in anything, in going further when you also need energy for the journey back. But I made it. We got home, we had a cup of tea, I rested. I declared that the next day, I would go all the way to the top of the path.

My sister arrived - much joy! - and her and I were alone in the house on Wednesday morning while mum and dad were at work. The good old days, free reign, bye mum! Biscuits and tea in front of the TV. She accompanied me for my walk this time, I told her my lofty goal, and in the bright sun and the whipping wind, we passed our old den in the bushes and chatted and strolled up this well-worn path of ours. A lifetime of walking together, that old rhythm, that old meandering chat. I was getting tired, but I was determined to make it to the end of the path. I touched the lamppost at the end - this had become an important part of the game - and we cheered. We walked back, and settled in front of the TV until mum came home to join us for lunch. When dad came home later, I told him about my phenomenal achievement.

Again, the walking is not actually part of my official recovery, but it feels important to me. I have to be outside, I have to be moving, and it felt fantastic to set goals and share time with my family in this small expedition. I could physically see my improvement each day in metres, and as my brother-in-law said, “The journey of a million miles starts with one lamppost.”

I’m back in my own home now, and the distances between things around my house are different, and I’m recalibrating what would be a decent set of goals. I bought a birthday card for a friend last week, intending to post it on the Thursday ahead of his birthday on Monday. I wish, really, wish, I’d written it as soon as I bought it, because now he’s going to have a really squiggly “happy birthday!” written by my non-dominant hand. I’ve already apologised for its lateness. But the post box is the other end of the high street here, I wonder if I can make it up there and back? Perhaps even home via the park? When I’m working from home, that’s my usual loop just to have a quick stretch of the legs. Can I manage that? And most of all, can I make it on my own? It’s a brave new world out here, on the other side of the crash, but if I’ve learned anything at all from the many kindnesses I’ve received, I’m not really alone at all.

Wish me luck.

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I screamed for a really long time. In books, a narrator will sometimes say they thought the scream was coming from someone else, it was like an outer-body experience, but this was definitely me. Because as long as I could hear myself screaming, I was alive.

We scream as babies. Screech with laughter. Howl in ecstasy. A sustained note is feedback to the brain that all is well, the lungs are good and the mind can express itself. It was only when I landed in the boggy ditch, my bike blasted into about five pieces, plus various detritus scattered across the road, that I fell silent. I could feel cold seeping into my shoe. Slime at my hands, pain at my wrist. I had to get out of this bog. I had to call the police. An incident had happened and I needed to report it. This was first and foremost.

I saw the car on its side in a bush on the opposite side of the road, about 50 metres away. There was no way the driver way okay, I thought, but I heard banging on the doors while I told 999 I needed the police. What had happened in the simplest terms? A car came swerving and speeding towards me and it hit me. The details are that it was night, that the headlights were blaring, that I only had time to cycle into the verge and hope for the best, and when it came straight for me, I was beyond petrified. I hoped it would veer away in time. It didn’t.

While I was on the phone, I was asked if I needed an ambulance. I knew my wrist didn’t feel right, so sure, why not, better safe than sorry. Another car pulled up, they had been close behind me, and they investigated the crashed car. A man jogged over to me to check I was okay and I assumed it was someone from the other car, I said I was on the phone to the police, and the man ran away. I stretched my legs out in front of me. My right leg looked strange. It was missing some of its usual shape. The colours weren’t normal, something was glistening white. I went very dizzy, and the man on the other end of the line told me to keep listening to his voice, to keep breathing, to apply pressure to the wound. I fiddled my Bath Half finisher T-shirt out of my bag and held it onto the shin-long wound as best I could, waiting, waiting for the ambulance.

A woman and her teenage son came over to me. They hadn’t realised I was there. They were from the other car; the man who had checked I was okay was the driver. How had he got out of this unscathed? His big car, his insane speeding and swerving, my little bike, my little Miffy bell. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been a head-on collision with the woman and her young son on this narrow country lane, and that’s too awful to think about.

My train had been delayed by 45 minutes; a delayed freight train and then signal problems. Oh yes, I must remember to claim my delay repay. How sweet, how tender: this had been a matter of utmost priority just half an hour before this moment.

Singing along to Avril Lavigne in the ambulance with the paramedics, intermittently sucking on gas and air. Telling the story as clearly and succinctly as I could to every nurse and doctor. Him, by my side, as quickly as he could, as near as he could be, missing him while I was in the ambulance, while I was in X-ray, glad he wasn’t around when the surgeon used ten litres of water to wash and pick the twigs and mud out of my leg. Glad he was there to witness a doctor realign my wrist with heady drugs, massage and exquisite coaxing. Glad he was there when I broke down because I was struggling to eat cornflakes with my non-dominant hand. It’s not fair. I had only been trying to get home.

Glad my mum and dad were there as soon as they could be, to share in the gentle jokes with nurses and doctors at the heart of being human. Glad to hold them and confirm, in touch and in voice, that I was basically okay. To marvel with everyone about just how wildly lucky I’d been. I hope this is the worst thing that ever happens to my body. That this is it, the extent of it, nothing will ever be this bad again.

Late on Thursday night, the consultant confirmed that the shin bone hadn’t broken, and told me that amazingly, the muscle was still in tact. The skin came together nicely and didn’t need a skin graft. Any pain I would feel walking would just be due to the skin and the swelling. I could bear weight, and in two weeks the wound would heal.

“How long until I can run again?” I semi-jokingly asked. What I meant was, how long until I can reclaim my body, until I can move with that specific, wild freedom, until I do the things I understood about myself before a maniac in an Audi nearly took so much away from me. “Two weeks,” he said. I sat up in bed, our eyes remained locked, tears poured down my cheeks and I swear I saw emotion well up in his too, I swear he understood my question, the weight of his answer, understood me, this man who had painstakingly washed and picked the dirt from my bones.

The physio visited me on Friday, and made me feel confident about taking steps, climbing stairs and wiggling my fingers. I write by hand a lot, and it’s going to be a while before I can do that again. But I will keep flexing my fingers, making a fist, bending and extending my leg. I will do everything I can to fight back until I’m better.

I will be scarred by this, but it won’t be a scar of damage: it will be one of strength and resilience. It will be one of love and gratitude. It will be a mark of celebration, because my gosh, it’s better than the alternative. I wish this hadn’t happened to me. But I’m thankful it happened the way it did. I will grumble about the pain, I will wail that it’s not fair, but a sustained note is a sign that I’m alive. Every grievance is an utter gift. Every wince and struggle is a reminder that I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. I’m here.

Readers of my previous post, and of this Substack in general, will know I’ve developed a painful relationship with actually finishing races - this has been documented since the very start of this Substack, actually, with Lavaredo 120k in 2024. Hilariously, I paced the Bath Half Marathon until I was only running on fumes, to the point where I worried I would have to death-march over the finish line, or wouldn’t even make it. There was nothing in my legs, I was wheezing, I had tunnel-vision. I’d always laughed at the “hill” at the end of the race, thinking I would take it in my stride, but now I know: it feels very different if you’ve already run a hard half marathon. It is a long and extremely steep hill.

I kept running. I finally caught up to a woman who’d been ahead of me since about mile six, since I’d started to realise I was just going to have to lock into whatever pace I had, and tap into endurance. After that point, I periodically tapped the RSPB pin badges on my vest to remind myself why I was doing this. I just had to hold strong for the birds. The woman drifted further and further ahead of me until the last two miles, when she seemed to slow back down towards me while I sped up towards her. I thought, now it’s time to push, time to rinse whatever I have left, and hope I can maintain it. I think she thought similar, and we both surged, although she was unaware of my race playing out in tandem behind her.

On that hill, I felt a man begin to sprint behind me. That pushed me on. I realised I was suddenly alongside the woman - I challenged myself to dig even deeper and just get past her. A man beside me was also clearly hurting, but then his mate came up alongside him and put a hand on his shoulder, and they kicked into a new gear together, smiling and laughing. I snapped out of my tunnel-vision and smiled too, sped up too, and in the last 100m I found that extra reserve - my absolute favourite, it feels electric, it is the Survival Sprint to get away from a lion, the one your brain holds in the tank - and overtook the men, too.

After the finish line, my legs were very wobbly indeed. I worried I was going to be like one of those runners you see on a livestream, staggering around, unable to hold themselves upright anymore. I worried I’d have to sit down, I realised I might then struggle to get up. I leaned on a railing and gasped dramatically. I saw others doing the same. I realised I was doing so right in front of a portable toilet. Who cares, at this point? We are beyond dignity. We are champions.

I got my t-shirt, I got my medal. A lot of races nowadays give you the option of declining a t-shirt and medal when you sign up, so they can just supply as many as they need to, avoiding unnecessary waste. I really, really like this environmentally conscious push. But I love race t-shirts - they are part of my running wardrobe, I wear them all the time - and medals feel really precious to me nowadays. I used to see them as just a bit of tat, something to put in a box and get a flicker of joy at seeing every now and again. But now, it’s a tangible declaration that I actually finished a race. I dug deep and I didn’t give up. The universe didn’t conspire against me with illness and storms and sprained ankles, I managed to get from the start to the finish on my own two feet and at an honest effort.

For the rest of the day, I run my thumb along the braille on my medal. I try to learn what it feels like. I enjoy knowing what it looks like in a new language. I glow with being one.

I hated the last six miles, I hated the last mile even more, but I loved the beginning and the end. What a feat of endurance. A half marathon is a noble distance, it is to be respected. I envied the elite runners who got it done in a little over an hour: half an hour later, me and many others were still working at that effort, trying to see this thing over the line. Plenty of people were still pushing their personal limits long after that. I’m still in no rush whatsoever to run a road marathon, but a half is manageable. I’m inspired to train harder to suffer for less time. That’s how it works, right?

I see more half marathons in my future. I used to love 10ks. And I haven’t done a 10 mile road race since 2020. I’m inspired to go back to the roads. Why did I ever leave? I don’t even remember. Because it doesn’t have to be either/or, trail or road.

I loved the Bath Half. I want to get my pure road speed back. And 1:36:27 feels like a really wonderful way to start.

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A race I was supposed to be doing at the end of this month has been cancelled. The company has ceased trading. I won’t go into the details here, not least because it’s only just happened, and a lot is unclear. We will find out more about what happens to the individual runners’ entries, as well as what happens to the events themselves, in the weeks and months to come.

But personally, I am annoyed, frustrated, upset and out of pocket. This will be the fifth ultra marathon that I have neither started nor finished since 2023. I haven’t actually even finished one since August 2023. I thought I could rely on this one - I signed up because they were a solid, reputable company and I was excited to just enjoy 55km exploring the Yorkshire Dales and racing some other people to the finish line.

I’ve been through myriad confusing feelings about it. I’ve felt numb, I’ve felt like I just want to give up on the sport entirely and cancel my races for the rest of the year, all the way to feeling like an idiot. What must people think of me, I have wondered? Spending hundreds of pounds on these weird, long races every year to not even start them, let alone finish them. Only a fool would keep signing up for them. Would others start avoiding races I’ve signed up for, aware of the curse I bring?

To be honest, I’m still not out of the woods on that (slightly ridiculous) feeling, nor am I fully recovered from the thought of cancelling my races for the rest of the year. I just can’t keep going through the admin and the grief. It wears on my wellbeing, my finances, my work schedule, my career goals. What on earth is the world trying to tell me, if not that I should stay away from ultra marathons?

And then on Thursday night, having just received this news, I ran home through the wind. I wanted to do 8 repetitions of 400m at 10k pace, but the wind was blowing so hard, the rate of perceived exertion was just whatever it took to keep moving forwards, not backwards. It was kind of awful, but also fun and hilarious, and it sure did blow some cobwebs out of my ears. I spent the rest of the evening trying to understand the news about the race, trying not to let it affect me, then trying to let it affect me so that I could understand how I felt. I needed to sleep on it.

The next day, I mainly remembered the feeling of the run the night before. I could have done the reps backwards, using the tailwind to propel me. I could have just jogged home. Heck, I could have got the bus. But I chose the hardest option and I enjoyed it. I don’t know what that means besides being clearly, indefatigably, incorrigibly silly, destined to choose the most challenging way even when I’ve just received a blow to my plans and hopes. I’ll still laugh into the wind, apparently, enjoying my music and the pop in my feet at the very start of each interval.

And I suppose that’s how I’ll continue. It’s the Bath Half tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to learning what racing a half marathon feels like, and to just getting to race on tarmac for the first time in years. I’ve got hayfever coming out of my ears, so I’m getting my excuses in early, but as long as I keep moving forwards, not backwards, I should be okay.

I’m running the Bath Half for the RSPB, and you can still donate to my fundraiser! Doing it for a cause I care so much about has been hugely motivating throughout this training block, and will be tomorrow, too. I have already pinned my bib number to my vest with RSPB pin badges. (Swift, corncrake, song thrush and oyster catcher.) Thank you for anything you can offer, I’m extremely grateful, and thank you to everyone who has donated so far.

https://www.justgiving.com/page/lydia-thomson-bath-half

That route is always good for mental training for me. It never gets any easier, I only take the hills harder, so thoughts of self-doubt and commitment to the sport and even self-worth start to get noisy. I messaged a friend while I was eating my sandwich, expressing my woe at being so slow nowadays, and she knew all the right things to say. She told me to just run with my happy heart. I put my sandwich bag back in my pack, and started jogging again, still chewing the last mouthful.

Yes, I remembered all of this from training on this route last summer: I have to go to the soft place in the middle of my mind where there is only breathing and motion, I have to be kind to myself, I have to turn my focus inside out and be awed by the insane beauty of these trails neighbouring the Cotswolds. In doing so, the world turns very quiet indeed. All noise is temporary. All birdsong is welcome. The sunlight sings across my skin.

I got the bus home from Bath Bus Station and there was a sudden cacophony of otherness. The single-decker bus was absolutely rammed, parents with children standing in the centre aisle, teenagers finding anything and everything completely hilarious. It wasn’t until that moment that I realised just how gentle the past few hours had been. I turned my face to the window and tried to remember, tried to preserve, the peace I still felt in my body. It was there, the quiet drowned out the irritation, pushed away everyone else’s anxious energy. I smiled in my happy heart.

I was working in London at the beginning of this week. I really enjoyed the roar of it - not always the case - and drank in the panoply of culture, smells, languages and history. Rye Lane in Peckham was a real highlight: I ran up it remembering everything I loved about the film of the same name. It really is full of life: at 8:30am hundreds of different days are in full flow, they spill out onto the street and colour the air, they shout and zing. When I lived in London, that amount of activity would have been hell for me. Now, it’s novelty, and it’s nice to have regained this relationship with the city.

The tube back to Paddington, to my train home, was busy. The carriage was noisy. Like the bus from Bath, there was a background squeal of anxious energy and I wanted no part of it, I had loads of time until my train, I didn’t need to get caught up in the others inefficiently trying to dart through the crowds, saving a fraction of a second on their overall ascent to the station. I know, I sympathise, I’ve been there, anything you can do to feel like you’re making better progress completely dominates. Poor woman, racing off the tube as soon as the doors opened, was at the opposite end of the platform to the exit. I sauntered behind the crowds and saw a sign for the lift immediately to my right. The passageway was completely empty. I entered the void with another woman and all of that stressful energy fell away.

She pushed the button for us both when we got into the lift. Softly spoken, serenely paced, she told me this was the secret quiet way to the station. “YES! I replied too energetically. “I wanted nothing to do with those crowds!!” “It takes us up to the station,” she purred. “It’s a good tip.” “YES!!” Hushhhh. She soothed me, the lift soothed me, the whole huge empty world of this route soothed me. When I got to the ticket barriers, the same woman who had raced off my carriage and through the crowds cut just slightly ahead of me to pass through. I really felt for her. I hope she made her train.

More speed, less haste? It’s always the case. I tell myself that all the time. I hate rushing, I hate being busy, I hate the noise of it all. My lessons this week have primarily affirmed what I’ve always known: there is a way of moving that doesn’t have to be so fraught. There is a way of running that doesn’t have such high stakes. And ultimately, often, you arrive at exactly the same time. Colour, noise and explosions of life still exist, I just don’t have to participate. I can observe, and enjoy the secret quiet way instead.

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American author, journalist, playwright and filmmaker, Nora Ephron, is famed for saying “everything is copy.” She was quoting her mother, also a writer, and she believes she meant that all life experiences are fuel for writing. The phrase is the title of a documentary about Ephron from 2015 made by one of her sons, journalist Jacob Bernstein, which I watched recently.

Ephron died in 2012 of Leukemia. She kept her illness secret from almost everyone, to the point where her friends were surprised and hurt to hear that she was dying, because they thought they were close enough that she would have told them. In the documentary, interviewees allude to her privacy being to do with control issues - it was her way of managing something so cataclysmic, “to make it not exist”, says her son. One of her closest friends, author Marie Brenner, says: “At the most powerful moment of her life, when she was facing her death, it was not material, it was not a story.”

It got me thinking about the things in life that don’t make it to the page. Sometimes they just feel too private, even to be seen by yourself. Some experiences can only be recognised for what they were months later, such is the immediacy and awe they provoke at the time. Conversely, sometimes we work them out over and over again in the public sphere, constantly dancing around the central catalyst because we don’t understand it ourselves. The greatest filmmakers, the greatest novelists, the greatest visual artists, do this for whole lifetimes.

Last week, I spent long mornings re-writing my forthcoming book by hand. My editor and I have had back-and-forth about broader edits and line edits, and then I said, “I wrote it so long ago now, I struggle to edit it, because it’s not my voice anymore.” I said I would go back over it, changing the tense. He said to just do a few chapters. I decided to write it in a notebook by pen. He told me not to rewrite it, but I have, I can only blame the flow of the pen, and it already looks and sounds so much more comfortable. (Sorry though, Jon.) The content is the same, but the voice is now mine.

It’s a memoir about a different girl, and it’s unsettling to comb back over it. I sort of stopped running last week. The weather was terrible, but I also just wanted to stay still, stay solid, stay tangible. I can’t help but think the book had something to do with it. I was in the headspace of my 2022 self, with all her neuroses and dreams and deep loves, and I ended up creating this really fragile, vulnerable, private space that I thought I was managing really well, but maybe I was struggling to leave it.

Burn more essential oils. Burn more palo santo. Stare out of the window at the pouring rain once more. Swirl the words in the cauldron until you make peace with slashing out huge chunks of your life, because they don’t fit the narrative arc you’re now curating.

I submitted an article to iRunFar, I finally finished an edit of an essay I’ve been working on for a few years. But this, this experience of raking over exactly how I want to tell my story of coming-of-age, finding a home, learning how to be alone and running 100 miles, this is not copy. When I work with authors recording their audiobooks, they all have the same shadow behind their eyes when they talk about the editing process. I think I get it now. I think I’m in it. Authors say very little about it to me, besides it was “tough”, “hard”, and “this draft is very different from what it was.”

It takes as much out of me as a long run. I arrive home - I look up from my notebook and blink around the room - with the same exhaustion, the same need for a cup of tea and a warm bath. But I feel worse, I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck, because I didn’t realise I’d been hunched like Golem over the ring for two and a half hours. I would roll my eyes at the narcissism of it all, but the whole point is that I’m not marinating in my own story, I’m not being precious about it at all. I’m looking at it with a scathing, critical eye and pretending parts of it don’t matter.

Nora Ephron wrote brilliantly about herself and her own life. The film Heartburn is a retelling of her divorce from author and journalist Carl Bernstein; the character of Sally in the film When Harry Met Sally is similar to Ephron. I’m reading her collection of reflections ‘I Remember Nothing’, and it is full of witty and warm notes on her own thoughts and experiences. Ephron saw stories in the tiniest of everyday things. Everything is copy, except when it’s something of such magnitude as her own death. I wonder if there’s an element of shame to this, too. By writing about something, you own the narrative: people are laughing with you, not at you. But what if it feels so shameful you cannot find an angle on it? So deeply private, you simply can’t reach down and elevate it to an external talking point?

Earlier this week, I was walking down a set of stairs on the other side of a railway bridge, feeling spritely, so I took them with a little bounce. An elderly man coming up the stairs said to me, “It’s all downhill from here, now!” The truth of the matter was that I had another small hill to walk up after the stairs, but these are mere details. What was more interesting to me was why he said it. He, on the last step of his colossal climb up to the railway bridge, was remarking on my own beginning of an easy descent. He knew it was all downhill for him now, too. We were on the cusp of spring, on a mild day in February with dry skies and occasional sunshine, gliding downhill to summer. Maybe this is his way of talking about the inevitable passage of time that afflicts us all - it is constantly, always, downhill from here towards death. He’s found a language for it that works for him. He says it to everyone, even when no hill and no set of stairs are involved.

Or maybe, he just wanted to connect with someone else in a light-hearted way.

But it’s never just a light-hearted connection, is it. Not when everything is copy.

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It’s not long to go now until the Bath Half. Four weeks? Not long at all. I’ve been doing my speed workouts along my favourite stretch of flattish, straight-ish road, which is an ideal 15 minute warm up/cool down jog away from my house. The road is part of a local village. It runs alongside some big houses, some old farms, some normal-sized houses, some allotments and some nice big fields with rich hedgerows. The people who live in the bigger houses go nuts with the daffodil bulbs, and I think this year, we’re about to see a bumper crop of happy, wobbly, yellow heads. This week, I saw a little bunny rabbit nuzzling in among the crocuses and daffodils. It was really intense.

It’s that sort of place. Pheasants dither about in the fields, there’s a community book swap shed, there are so very many birds flanking the road. I’m only running back and forth along a section that’s a little over a kilometre, but were I to carry on, the road continues to dip down and away to more open farmland and the next village. I believe my section has the best birdsong though, and I put that down to the allotments and the gardens. When I’m halfway through running 6x1km at 10k pace, their tweeting reminds me what I’m doing it for.

I’ve mentioned here before: I’m running the Bath Half for the RSPB. I’ve never run a half marathon race before, I have too much respect for the sheer mental endurance it must take to run an honest pace for 13.1 miles. It’s the same reason why I haven’t raced a road marathon, either. In trail, your pace changes minute by minute, your footing is rarely linear and your brain is always busy processing the next moves. On the road, it will just be me and how I feel, trying to stay as consistent as possible, for over an hour and a half. That’s terrifying to me.

It has absolutely occurred to me to just jog the event, to just enjoy 13.1 miles of Bath, the crowds, the general fanfare, and relish in having raised some money for a cause I deeply care about. But that feels extremely dishonest and disrespectful to the people who have donated. It also feels disrespectful to the birds. I love birds more than that, they deserve an honest race, and some degree of honourable sacrifice. I’m sure it’s pretty uncomfortable having your habitat devastated. The least I can do is run a bit faster.

So, that’s why I’m out on the flattish, straight-ish road, chasing some degree of the speed I once used to possess. I’m hoping it’s a fair trade for the training I should be doing for a 55k race at the end of March, but as the saying so famously goes, fitness is fitness. It feels a bit bonkers, and I must look a bit bonkers to the people in their houses and the men waiting in their vans, running up and down in the rain, sometimes jogging and singing along to Sylvan Esso. But I’m hoping this is also building the necessary mental grit to see me through the race itself. I’m developing the skill of just running the same stretch of road over, and over…and over. It’s not all rabbits and daffodils. Except when it is.

You can donate to my fundraiser here! https://www.justgiving.com/page/lydia-thomson-bath-half MASSIVE enormous thank you to everyone who has donated so far. I’m overjoyed. xx

In other news…

Ruth Croft and Dan Jones, both from New Zealand, have won the Tarawera Ultra-Trail 102k race yet again. This is Ruth’s 4th win there, and Dan’s 4th year in a row of taking the title. What is it about home advantage? I’d love to read some research on the psychology of it. Yes, there’s an advantage to being able train on the course or similar to terrain. In this case, there’s benefit in having won the race so many times before, in simply knowing how to play it. Also, particularly in track and field events, the support in the crowds on your home turf is going to be louder. But there is also just a feeling, isn’t there. Is there an extra performance gear, deriving from some ancient sense of defending your land and your tribe? A pondering. Feel free to comment, reflect, and share any insight you might have!

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I am better in motion.

Hands so cold I try to turn the key in my front door with two paws, struggling to apply enough pressure to the final turn that will release the latch. Unable to untie my shoes: the paws, again, unable to roll down my socks. No, absolutely, no, this will not do, they will just have to stay on for my shower. The priority is heat, the priority is clean, clean the rain from my saturated form, ticking time, in no time now.

I am better in motion.

Mouth so dry the possible hydrating properties of a grass stem are appealing. Saturated with sweat, bottles sucked entirely dry, unscrew the cap and tip it in case there is even a tiny drop that might moisten the tongue. The sun’s heat still radiating off my skin as my slick sticky fingers turn the key in the lock and I don’t even take off my shoes, don’t even save the run on my watch, before pouring the coolest, wettest, best glass of water in existence. Slick down my throat, tingling my shoulders, the heat, the heat. The shower will remove it all. The water will soothe to clean. Time is not ticking. There is only time now. The heat.

The heat, I don’t even use the cold tap for the shower, don’t even open the window, I want nothing else to do with winter, not now, not ever again. So tired of it all: I had to walk the last two kilometres home, my re-waterproofed but failing waterproof doing nothing besides allowing the cold to swish against my skin, to hold it in my merino base-layer, to insulate the way I feel, to not get worse, as long as I keep moving. The cold is so close to my core. I know how this feels. I’m not there yet and I won’t get there, so long as I keep moving.

So long as I keep walking, this will be over soon.

So long as I keep running, this will be over soon.

It’s a fine line, a balancing act, it’s flirting with the dehydrated headache and should I run faster to reach water quicker, or move slower to put less stress on my body? It is sitting on a rock on the trail beneath the blessed canopy of the trees and really, being delighted with all of this. I am warm to the core, sweat stings my eyes, flies stick to my exposed upper arms. I am coconut oil and sun lotion and laundry detergent. I am zippy-eyed, when the brain is a bit woozy and can’t completely keep up with what the eyes see, even in all this brightness, this abundance of cow parsley against blue, clean green leaf against blue, the true dusty calico of the rock, the warm scuff of the mud, the tickle of buttercups and dandelions and nettles, oh nettles, how I curse them but also long for them, to see them grow strong and tall.

But before then, wild garlic, bluebells, crocuses, red kites, mating calls, running home in the light and running in the early morning in the light, are the kids outside because it’s lighter later, or can we just see them now that it’s lighter later? Possibility, hope, swimming in rivers again, lying down on the side of the trail again, just to smell the moss by my ears and squint at the twinkle of my dearest friend between the leaves. Ducklings, Egyptian geese, goslings. Moorhens and mallards sitting on the banks and being still beneath light. Before summer’s wild chasing, summer’s exuberance, summer’s internal confetti of relief and letting it all just be normal, letting a cycle home in twilight at 10 pm just be normal, be possible, letting it all be long, languid, wild and strange-limbed.

Until then, the cuffs of sleeves tucked over thumbs. Breath short, shoulders tight. This, that day, hiking up a road with drips of rain falling from nowhere down the back of my neck, drips of rain falling into my mouth, drips of rain pooling above my eyebrows. The relentless granite grey from road to sky to eye. Teardrops drip off the ends of the twigs and branches that flank my sorry hike, bubbling to consume the bud of new growth before falling to the sodden earth. I go to the soft spot in the centre of my brain and all else is external, all else is just a body in motion.

I am better in motion.

I wake in the dark, I go outside in the light. Every day the minutes get lighter. The buttercups are only waiting. The buds are only waiting. I cannot be present in winter any longer, I am better in motion, I am only waiting.

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Afterwards, talking with the man who’d overtaken me, we revealed that while I always go off too fast, it takes him a while to warm into it. He is faster than me in general, but I like the idea of training with him again. I tried to keep him the same distance from me throughout the rest of the session, the red light from his head torch blinking in the distance, but he stretched ahead ever so slightly on every rep. Solid.

I was in no man’s land. Apart from his light, I was completely on my own for every rep around the triangle. I had to laugh - I’d come to club to run with others, and ended up on my own. I either had to get faster or slow down. But the ghosts of others were keeping me pushing so that I wasn’t overtaken, keeping me pushing so as not to fall behind. This is the sort of race-day mentality that I love, and reflecting afterwards, I wondered if there’s a psychological element to these sessions that’s beneficial for those scenarios. If I can practice being really comfortable in that situation, I will remove any novel stress and be able to react with a clear head. I think it’s helpful to strip ego away in that circumstance and just to play moves according to the cards in your hand.

Otherwise you feel pressured, get distracted and sprain an ankle. Or something.

Warning: the following contains running nerd content. It is mainly running nerd content. Like myself chasing the men up the hill, it’s okay to just let it speed away from you.

The GOAT (Greatest of All Time) Kilian Jornet has spoken:

https://mtnath.com/stateoftrail2026/

We crawled to the top of the mountain and sat at his feet to listen. He has written a piece on his blog about the state of trail running - where we are, and where it’s going. It’s quite a long piece, helpfully broken up into categories, but I think worth a read if you’re a superfan of the sport like me.

What caught me most about it was a call to remember simplicity: he acknowledges that trends like lactate monitoring, heat training and breathing sensors will continue to develop and grow more accurate, and we love these shiny new things, they make us believe we have a quick fix to becoming better athletes. But, Jornet says, “…[the] reality is that 99% of our capacity comes from the BASIC and INDIVIDUAL boring and unexciting training. Hope is that we finally give more attention to those: better connections to other humans and nature, better general nutrition, lower stress and more basic training thought towards the individual capacities that every of us has.” You can’t outrun a bad diet, and you can’t lactate monitor your way out of the demands of mountainous terrain.

On that, a section I found particularly interesting was his analysis of the decline of technical races. Nowadays, what we refer to as “technical terrain” in trail running is at most a couple of roots and rocks. That is not technical by the standards of traditional sky races, the likes of which used to be dominated by a handful of true mountaineers. Jornet reflects on the fact that in order for a race to be profitable, it needs to be able to accept more participants. In order to accept more participants, it needs to be safer to account for the breadth of experience and level of skill. As such, the trickier parts of the race get diverted. Imagine if Ultra Trail Snowdonia ran over Crib Goch? Or if more races in the Lake District took in an ascent of Scafell Pike? The insurance would be sky high.

This lean towards safer events is not necessarily a problem, you might think, but it signifies a death of literacy in the mountains. We keep hearing about groups of people who have had to be rescued from the mountains, sometimes carrying tiny dogs, because they are ill-equipped and inexperienced, having a panic attack in joggers and trainers while a couple of kids carve out steps in the snow for them to safely get down. I’m sorry, but that’s so lame. I sympathise, I get it, I do understand, but I think it’s a shame we’re not educated in the ways to approach some of the most beautiful landscapes in our country, and in the world. I deeply want that education and I want it for others. I want us all to be able to properly see, experience, appreciate and therefore care about the future of our natural world.

Jornet finishes this point simply by saying, “But if we don’t want to become a long or high elevation cross country sport in the future, and for a more friendly entry to new participants into the sport, the implementation of a technical grading system will be necessary.” I massively concur. It’s all well and good looking at the distance and elevation of a mountain ultra, but that’s 30% of the story. I think we’d see a much lower DNF rate if participants really knew the technicality of what they were getting into. As the sport continues to grow, as more and more races sell out in days or go through a lottery system, I believe the entry criteria should move to something more similar to the fell running model in the UK. I looked at trying to do a particular fell race this summer but as it stands, I can’t, because I haven’t completed any races of a lower grading. They literally state that a waymarked trail ultra does not qualify you for the race. You have to be able to prove that you can navigate yourself. For example:

“To be eligible to compete in Borrowdale Fell Race, runners must have previous experience of long, arduous fell races and, if they have not previously completed Borrowdale Fell Race, runners must have completed at least two different category A or B long or two different category A medium fell races (race categories as defined by the Fell Runners Association) since 1st January 2023. Entry to Borrowdale Fell Race will be refused to any runner who cannot demonstrate such experience.”

My first thought was that it’s easy if you’ve grown up with it. But why don’t we all grow up with it, to some degree? Socio-economic, opportunity, geography, all of that. But clearly even a basic understanding is missing: a basic, theoretical appreciation of the demands.

I just think the categories of technicality is a really interesting point, and as more elite road runners are moving over to trail, crushing course records with relative ease, I’ve maintained that I want to see how they fair at a race like Hardrock 100. Or indeed, Ultra Trail Snowdonia. Running on hard-packed, polished trails with 2mm lugs is lovely. Skipping over the odd tree route is fun. But it’s not the same sport as those tough, gnarly, mountainous ultras, and at the moment we’re comparing apples to oranges, or eating an orange expecting it to be just like an apple. If we know what we’re getting into, and if we can experience an appropriate level of literacy for the challenge ahead of us, we only stand to get more out of it.

I want it, I want to orienteer, I want to know my way around a foggy fell with a compass and a map. I want to read the weather, I want to have looked at that cloud coming over the fells in the Lake District during the 7 Valleys race in September and known, understood, stayed low, waited it out, got layers on when it was safer and easier to do so. Instead I took a video of it in awe and hiked on. Classic, classy millennial. These are simple skills, forgotten in the fug of super foams and carbon plates and learning whether ice baths are actually detrimental to recovery. What use is any of that when you’ve got hypothermia? (Well actually, would regular ice baths reduce your chances of catching hypothermia? There’s a thought.) I think my time and headspace could be better devoted to continuing to learn the essential, natural, truly life-saving skills of being outdoors and in the wild. The benefits there far exceed those of a shiny new pair of shoes. And yet I believe the right lug depth will save me. Oh, am I doomed?

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Oh friends, we are deep, deep into January now, aren’t we. I’ve resisted properly writing about it, because everyone writes about it, we’re all “Wintering” in the Northern Hemisphere, and hey, I love reading about it, it makes me feel less alone, I take it all on board, yes listening to birds and learning more and seeing more and yes, I saw snowdrops just yesterday and yes, the shoots of early daffodils are higher than they were before, and my own ones seem to have survived any frost, maybe by virtue of being sheltered underneath my fuschia. Yes.

I know all of these things. I follow my own advice and when going outside seems impossible, I simply take an item out to the recycling bin. I don’t thinks it’s ever felt as rough beyond the front door as it seemed from behind the kitchen window, and I’ve always managed to roll that task into more, to get outside again, to end up putting together something resembling a Complete Day. But nothing besides the weather changing will take away that baseline January feeling.

Running helps, of course it does. Even in yet another influx of rain, mist or drizzle, slipping and sludging and trudging in the mud, yelling out loud, “This is exhausting!” I always feel better. I’m not even just better for getting back home to a cup of tea, no, I’m better for being out there, there’s nowhere I’d rather be at that moment.

…Well hang on. Okay. Somewhere with clear skies and warmer temperatures wouldn’t go amiss.

But I mean it. Those exhausting swampy trails that suck the daylight out of me actually make me stronger. I’m tired because it’s hard work. I’m stressed because my brain is trying to see a path through, over and over again, a skill I desperately need to work on for running in the mountains. My calves, my quads, and all the muscles in between are taking a hammering, but by spring, when I hope to be lining up for the second time to run Ultra Trail Snowdonia 50k, won’t all that hard work come in useful? All that capacity for endurance.

I also mean this more broadly. I really thought this year that I could pretty my way through my least favourite season by having the heating on more regularly, making candles and meditating. But ultimately, by this point in the season, I’m still ground down. So maybe we just have to give into it: resisting winter won’t save us. Hibernating certainly won’t - I tried it and my mental health plummeted even further. Very few positive thoughts come from giving up on oneself. (‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’ by Ottessa Moshfegh is one of my favourite books in the world, but it is a warning, not an example to live by.)

So, we have to embrace enduring. Yes it takes effort, yes it’s hard, but is there a way to make it Type 2 fun? The sort that’s awful at the time but ultimately feels great? This does mean going outside in the freezing rain. This does mean crawling awake even though it’s still pitch black outside. This does mean all the pretty things too, the birds, the snowdrops, the crafting, the soft blankets, but this was my mistake: they are a reward, not a saviour. I’ve been seeking ways to get out of January, to pretend the full scope of all it entails isn’t really happening, but this pursuit is pointless. It’s ultimately probably worse.

Take it mile by mile. Just get to the next aid station. Keep eating, stay hydrated, keep moving. Remember to look up and around, remember to take it in. Remember a sense of humour and of humility. You chose to do this.

Nothing saves us from the seasons, from the passage of time. You can chase it around the globe, but it’s still happening. It is a rhythm. We can change the narrative, though: this, all of this, is where we learn to be strong. And come spring, when the trails have finally dried up, I’ll be flying down them, allowing my limbs to turn soft again around all that they have endured, my mind to turn soft around all that it’s endured. This is the virtue of the seasons: no season lasts so long that it makes us weak. We harden, we mellow, we strengthen, we thrive. Nothing and no one else will save us. We can only save ourselves. There lies resilience, there lies the true essence of endurance, there is the lesson that nature teaches us, and that it had been yelling at me all along.

Here is a list of my biggest recommended reading for this time of year. None of these are an escape from what’s happening. They are friends through it all:

• A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter

• A Cabin in the Mountains by Robert Ferguson

• Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson

• Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

• My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (the audiobook is insanely good, it’s like listening to Julia Whelan perform a one-woman show, rather than an audiobook.)

• Wintering by Katherine May

  

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