Leave Lockdown Stronger Than Ever: Advice From An Ultra-Marathon Runner

From P.E. dodger to marathon runner

I, like a lot of people, had a horrific relationship with exercise for a really long time. I started doing it because I wanted to lose weight and, as a result, my relationship with it was incredibly negative. I obsessed over calories, wouldn’t go to sleep until I’d completed 100 sit-ups, and ran solely as a punishment for eating “too” much. 

This changed when I signed up to run my first marathon in May 2019. Without being too dramatic, it changed my life and during that process I learned a great deal about myself. For the first time I was exercising not for how my body looked but for what it could do and, I realised how it made me FEEL. 

I was the happiest I had ever been that year, which was why, before the blisters had even had a chance to heal, I decided to do another one a few months later in November and then why again, I said yes to running the London marathon, in 2020, a few months after that. 

Running totally changed my relationship with exercise. The abs that I thought I wanted became irrelevant. Where I used to look at calories on my fitness trackers, I now measured distances. I’d wanted for so long to be SMALL. And then all I wanted was to be STRONG. 

To complete London marathon in April 2020 would’ve meant that I’d have run 3 marathons in one year. My back was a bit tired (I had a couple of problems with my sciatic nerve) and I’d lost 7 toenails, but I was loving it. I was fit and strong and moving and energised and excited and PROUD and pushing myself and confident and it was all going fab. 

Then the marathon got cancelled. 

And the gyms closed. 

And I, like a lot of people, saw my relationship with exercise change again, entirely. 

Surviving lockdown life

After lockdown restrictions were announced I all but stopped running. I went back to my mum’s house at the beginning of the pandemic and couldn’t hack the hills (I’d only ever run in lovely, flat, London before) and without something to aim for I let it all fizzle. 

I did a bit of cycling (honestly didn’t have a lot else to do and it was good for getting me out the house) and, like the rest of the country, did my fair share of Instagram live classes but it wasn’t… the same. 

I felt myself getting weaker, and slower, and further away from the person that I’d been so proud to be becoming the year before. Mostly I just couldn’t really see the point of any of it. 

And then one sunny day, bored out of my mind of the same four walls I’d stared at for months, at saturation point with IG lives and filled up with an anxious energy, I did something I’d never done before: I went running through a field… and I didn’t hate it. So I did it again. And then again. And it was different.  

I wasn’t smashing out the split times, I got lost a lot and I was going down on my ankles about four times a minute and having to walk a lot… in fact I was probably walking more than I was running for most of them, but I was happy. 

Which was why I decided at the end of last year that I was going to run an ultra-marathon. Let’s blame lockdown. With hindsight it was an impulsive decision but it gave me what I needed and that was my spark. After such a sedentary and uncertain year, I found this to be exactly what I needed.  

I was out the house and trying something new, getting lost, having fun, pushing myself and TRYING again. I wasn’t worried about looking like a knob, or failing, or anything really: I was just doing it. 

And it was epic. I ran it alone, in the end. I plotted my own route and roped my family in as my support crew (my fiancé and my mum both ran 10 miles each with me!) and on a dark and snowy morning in January, I pushed myself in a whole new way. 

It changed my life again.