I still don’t know why that was the tool I opted for in the midst of misery. I’d never done any kind of strenuous exercise before in my life. But I had spent a lifetime holding at bay the need to run away – from my mind, from my negative thoughts; from the worries that built up and calcified, layer upon layer, until they were too strong to chip away at. Maybe the sudden urge to run was a physical manifestation of this desire to escape my own brain. I guess I just wanted to do it for real.
Plus, I was impatient to bypass the ice-cream-binging stereotype of a break-up – I’ve always been keen for a quick fix. I wanted the bad feelings and heartache to be gone fast. A break-up is always a good time to try and do something new, after all. I had the added benefit of also wanting to break free of my lifelong fears, and I really felt like time was running out to do that. I was about to turn thirty, and I was terrified that I would use the break-up as another excuse to retreat, to box myself in even more, to be scared of life itself.
I was not ready to run across a playing field by any means. Being too scared to go to the supermarket put paid to any grandiose ideas like that. There was no climactic movie moment where I streaked across a prairie or raced through a downpour. In reality, I didn’t know what I was doing and I fleetingly wondered if I was in fact becoming delusional. It seemed like such a strange thing for me to want to do, and yet even as I argued with myself, I was gathering my keys and lacing up my trainers.
I put on some old leggings and a T-shirt and walked to a dark alleyway thirty seconds from my flat. It fitted two important criteria: just near enough to the safety of home, and just quiet enough that nobody would laugh at me. I felt absurd and slightly ashamed – as if I was doing something perverse that shouldn’t be seen. Luckily, the only sign of life was a cat who stared at me disdainfully as I mustered up the energy to move. I was grateful when the cat immediately vanished; and any hint of an approaching human would have made me stop instantly. This kind of private punishment was too raw to be seen by strangers.
With my headphones in, I searched for suitable music and settled upon a song called ‘She Fucking Hates Me’ by a band called Puddle of Mudd. Not to my usual taste, but the lyrics were suitably angry and I didn’t want anything that might make me cry (everything was making me cry). The song is three minutes and thirty-one seconds long and the line ‘she fucking hates me’ comes up as many times as you might imagine. I think I managed thirty seconds of jogging before I had to stop, calves screaming and lungs burning. But the song was kicking off my adrenaline and so I rested for a minute, and then started off again. I somehow managed to keep time with the shouting singer, mouthing the words as I screwed up my face and lumbered down the path. I managed an incredible three minutes in stages (nearly all the song!) before I gave up and went home. Did I feel better? No. Did I enjoy it? Also no, but I hadn’t cried for at least fifteen minutes and that was good enough for me.
To my own surprise, I didn’t leave it there. I wanted to, it had felt pretty grim, but something in me overrode all my internal excuses. I went back to that same alley the next day. And the day after that. Those first few attempts were all pathetic really. A few seconds, shuffle, stop. Wait. Go again. Freeze if a person emerged from the shadows. Feel ridiculous. Carry on anyway. Always in the dark, always in secret, as if I was somehow transgressing.
I didn’t know what I was doing, or what I wanted to get out of these alley runs. As a result, I got overly ambitious in the following weeks, and I encountered frequent and minor disasters. I got shin splints, which hurt like hell. I ran too fast and had to stop after wheezing uncontrollably. I tried to go up a hill and had to admit defeat and get on a bus when it became clear that the hill had bested me; I had a panic attack in a dark part of the local park when I mistimed sunset and realised that I was all alone. I fell over and cried like a child. Running felt like a language that I couldn’t speak – and not only because I was hugely unfit – it seemed to be something that only happy healthy bouncy people did, not neurotic smokers who were scared of everything.
Throughout my life, if I couldn’t do something well on the first attempt, I was prone to quit almost immediately. It was embarrassingly clear to me that I was not running well, or getting better at it. And yet, much to my own quiet disbelief, I carried on. I carried on trudging up and down the dark alleyway for two weeks. And when I finally felt bored rather than just merely terrified or out of breath, I went a little bit further. For the first couple of months, I stuck to the roads closest to my flat – my brain always looking for the escape route – looping around quiet streets, and cringing when cars passed by. I was slow, sad and angry. But two things were becoming clear to me. The first was that when I ran I didn’t feel quite so sad. My mind would quieten down – some part of my brain seemed to switch off, or at least cede control for a few minutes. I wouldn’t think about my marriage, or my part in its failure. I wouldn’t wonder if my husband was happy, or out on a great date, or just not thinking about me at all. The relief this gave me was immense.
The second thing, which was even more valuable, was that I noticed that I wasn’t feeling so anxious. Soon enough, I was reaching parts of the city that I hadn’t been able to visit in years, especially alone. I mean, I’m not talking the centre of Soho and its bustling crowds, but within a month I was able to run through the markets of Camden without feeling like I would faint or break down. I could not have done this if I’d been walking – I’d tried so many times but my anxiety would break through, palms sweating and looming panic taking over. But somehow, running was different. When your brain has denied you the chance to take the mundane excursions that most people do every day, being able to pass through stalls selling ‘nobody knows I’m a lesbian’ T-shirts suddenly feels like a red-letter day. By concentrating on the rhythm of my feet striking the pavement, I wasn’t obsessing over my breathing, or the crowds, or how far I was from home. I could be in an area my brain had previously designated as ‘unsafe’, and not feel like I was going to faint. It was miraculous to me.
Joyce Carol Oates once described how running enables her writing, positing that it helps as ‘the mind flies with the body’.[3] I take that to mean that your body takes your brain along for the ride. Your mind is no longer in the driving seat. You’re concentrating on the burn in your legs, the swing of your arms. You notice your heartbeat, the sweat dripping into your ears, the way your torso twists as you stride. Once you’re in a rhythm, you start to notice obstacles in your way, or people to avoid. You see details on buildings you’d never noticed before. You anticipate the weather ahead of you. Your brain has a role in all of this, but not the role it is used to. My mind, accustomed to frightening me with endless ‘what if’ thoughts, or happy to torment me with repeated flashbacks to my worst experiences, simply could not compete with the need to concentrate while moving fast. I’d tricked it, or exhausted it, or just given it something new to deal with.
Much research has been done on why running clears your head so effectively. Scientists seem intent on finding out why it works. I’m glad they are – I’d like to know exactly why running changed my life, but honestly I’m mainly just happy that it has. Studies have found that there is an increased activity in the brain’s frontal lobe after activity – the area linked to focus and concentration – in subjects with mild cognitive impairment and in elderly participants.[4] [5] Research on animals has shown that exercise produces new neurons – cells found in the hippocampus, associated with memory and learning.[6] It’s all fascinating stuff. But to my mind, none of this can adequately convey the rush that exercise promises to give you – that’s the main interest to most of us – the so-called runner’s high. (People with more experience with drugs than I have had will have to judge whether it is comparable to a more, er, recreational experience.) That an hour or so of energetic movement a day might fix our stressed and gloomy heads is understandably alluring, especially to those of us who’ve struggled with depression or anxiety for a sustained (read intolerable) period of time.
This is what I was beginning to dip my toes into. Weeks after my marriage collapsed, I was still sick with it all. At work, I would regularly go into the toilets and cry quietly. At home, I would put on my pyjamas the moment I got in and mindlessly watch whatever the TV had to offer. When I went out, I drank too much and would cry again (less quietly this time, to the delight of my