Relax into your stress - A gradual move from pain to enjoyment

A few weeks ago I wrote something about why I run. At that point, in a time of crisis, running was a way of obliterating myself physically to give me some respite from my overthinking mind. To bring me back into the present moment and to stop me being swamped by sadness and anxiety.

At a time when other parts of my life had come apart, and I was full of self-doubt, with running I was trying to prove that in at least one thing, I can succeed. To salvage something out of the ashes.

At that point I mostly only enjoyed running after it was over. The relaxation was all in the recovery.

But trying so hard like that I was running like an ironing board on legs. The tin man before he got any oil. Tense, straining, anxious, restless, impatient.

Running in August. Mostly pain

When I got to the point by the end of August that my calf muscles felt ready to snap I realised I needed to calm down a bit.

Ten years ago I went on a cycling trip in India. One day I'd cycled all day and I was lost and couldn't find my accommodation and I was feeling quite frantic when I bumped into an English lady called Lorna picking up litter in the street. Apart from Dean who I was travelling with, hers was the first English voice I'd heard for a few days.

Meeting Lorna 

She told me to "relax into my stress'. I don’t know exactly what that means, but that phrase often comes back to me when I'm running. And I've thought of it often since the end of August.

You've probably heard stories of babies sometimes surviving car or plane crashes or falls out of windows. I've always believed this was because they've not aware of the danger so they don't tense up.

But I looked it up here. Babies can get stressed just like the rest of us but their sometime survival is more to do with biology then psychology. They're soft and light and squidgy. They don't get thrown about in the same way as heavier, more rigid people so they're more equipped for impact. And their lungs work better then older people's who have knackered theirs, so they have a better chance of still being able to breathe even when they're under the rubble of a collapsed building.

So since the beginning of September I decided to run more like a baby and less like the tin man  To be light and flexible and as if I’ve got new lungs (yes, I realise this analogy doesn't really work because babies can't run but just go with it). As it turns out, the closest you can get to having new lungs is to join a running club. Running interval sessions in particular is like taking them into The Repair Shop.

September - a state approaching enjoyment

And generally I've tried not to be so desperate and tense and impatient about everything. Not just running but also to stop worrying so much about forming new connections and relationships. Just to let things happen in their own time.

In the last two weeks I've equalled my two fastest ever patkruns times. During both those runs there were points where I was ready to tense up and I tried to remember to relax into that stress. To be soft and light like a baby.

Stats - Boring as shit to some people but practically what I live for!

Obviously a large part of running faster will be down to 3 months spent at the running club. And I still have the benefit of all those tensed up runs in July and August in the bank. I'm not saying it's all down to relaxing more. But recently I've just tried to stop trying so hard.

And in the last few weeks I've also noticed a shift in how I FEEL about running. I've started to enjoy it DURING as well as AFTER IT'S OVER. Part of this is down to getting fitter but it's also down to the people I run with now, whose company helps the miles fly by unnoticed.

Me in October - At a turning point (literally)

Babies are also famous for being full of wonder and curiosity about the world around them. For generally being interested in things. The more time I spend running and talking with other people and finding out about their lives, the easier it is to switch off my own inner monologue. And the more I go to different places and notice the world around me, the less time and attention I have left to think about ways that my life hasn't gone to plan.  Gradually, I'm learning to relax into my stress.

I'm not an idiot. I also know that part of all this is just adaptation, the way time works. The longer ago things happened, the easier they are to live with. The past is still there, and I haven't forgotten anything, but it's just not as heavy, it doesn't press on me with as much urgency. Like me when I run, it’s got softer and lighter on its feet.

How to organise your sock drawer: a filing system for the mind

I sometimes look for people in places where I’m not likely to find them. And if that sounds silly, maybe I should explain.

This picture has no relevance to the story. It's just for decoration.

I split up with my partner a few months ago. During the time we were together we went to hundreds if not thousands of places. Sometimes when I pass one of those places, I stop to look if she’s there. I know it’s not likely, but because I’ve seen her there before, I still look. It’s the right place, but at the wrong time.

For example, I regularly go past Leeds Art Gallery. We once met there for lunch in the Tiled Hall Café during my lunch break from work. I remember she sat in Dante’s corner, as she called it, and she was pleased to see me. Well, now every time I go past, I call in and look for her in the same corner. She’s never there, but even though it’s very faint, I can still feel an echo of that past meeting.

At the end of our relationship, in our last few interactions, she was hurt and upset with me. My memories of those last few meetings are painful to recall. But experiencing a brief echo of a past meeting where things were more positive helps to dilute that.

We experience our lives from a linear viewpoint, measured in days and years, and sometimes the ways things end is painful. But once events are in the past, I wonder, does it make any difference what order things happened in?

When events are recent and / or distressing, the memories of those events are like Pringles in a tube where you have to take the top one first, but as you move on, they become more like socks in a drawer, you can pull out whichever pair you want.

My relationship ended with stress and annoyance it also had countless moments that were full of joy and happiness. My hope is that as time moves on, it gets easier to view all those moments as equal, not just giving more weight to the latest, more painful ones. Even when a situation ends badly, that shouldn't diminish the happy moments that also once existed.

Einstein said that ‘the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion". One of my favourite passages from any book is from Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. It's one of my favourites because I hope it's true.

“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever"

I don’t where my past relationship is now. But when I go to the Tiled Hall Cafe and hundreds of other places, I still feel a connection to it, an echo of past happiness. I can't change the past. But I can choose how to remember it. 

I may have to experience the present moment to moment,  stacking those moments one on top of the other like Pringles in a tube, But once those moments are in the past, I can take out whichever ones I most want to look at, no matter what order they were collected in. 

I'm not trying to pretend that difficult things didn't happen. Only that a horrible end doesn't have to ruin everything.

My best days, my good times and all my best moments 'always have existed, always will exist'

When all my socks are clean, and I've got a full drawer to choose from, there are some pairs I like better than others, and it's usually those I go to first. The ones I don't like so much are still in there, but I don't have to wear those if I don't want.

Stay away from the light! Hovering somewhere between life and death at my local running club

I joined a running club a couple of months ago (Roundhay Runners). As much to meet people and to have something to do as for the running. I'd found myself living in a new place, and with a lot of time on my hands, and I like running so it seemed an obvious thing to do.

I've been running for about 8 years. Mostly Parkrun, and mostly the same type of running. Running as fast as I can for between 25 minutes and an hour. No real variety. No slow running, no interval training. Just the same all the time. Since I joined the running club things have been different.

A couple of weeks ago I took part in the Leeds Dock Relay. Teams of 3 people, running laps of a 0.9 mile circuit at Leeds Dock, as many laps as you can in an hour. It sounds easy, you only have to run for roughly 20 minutes each, with 40 minutes off. Don't go off too fast, people said! But there's crowds cheering, and you see your team-mate coming round the corner, and they high-5 you, and off you go!

Rather unhelpfully, the first 100 metres actually has a 100 metre track painted on the pavement, and so off you go, and you think 'Hey, look at me, I'm in the Olympics, I'm the King of the World'. And then about 100 metres later, you get to a Tesco on the corner, and you realise that you're nearly dead, but you've still got 1300 metres to go. Luckily, the next 1000 metres or so, no-one can see you. You go round the back of some buildings, and you may as well be on the dark side of the moon, you're in a lonely netherworld purgatory, where your lungs are screaming, and your legs are screaming too, but you can't hear them for your lungs. And then after that you emerge into where people are again, and so you put a brave face on it, and keep running for the crowd. That first lap I did in 6 minutes 30, which is probably the fastest I've run since I was at school. But it's okay, because then you get about 12-13 minutes off, and because it's so fresh in your mind, you think, well I won't be doing that again. Then 13 minutes later, well, there's crowds and cheering, and there's adrenaline, and there's a 100 metre track on the road, so you do exactly the same again. Purgatory, hovering between life and death, I haven't learned a thing! And again, just to prove how little you've learned, you do it all exactly the same again, for a third time. And at the end, you forget about the death, and all you remember is that you had a really great time.

That was two weeks ago. This week I had a different kind of near death experience. In the form of a handicap race. It's a 6km route, made up of 2 3km laps. Everyone submits an estimate in advance of how fast they can run it, and then you set off at intervals, slowest to fastest. I submitted a pretty accurate estimate, since I run this type of distance a lot, some people provided slightly more questionable guesses. A group of 5 set off about 2 minutes before me, who I know can all run faster than me. Well, I'm never catching them I thought. Again, I ran at the limit of myself, which is a state of near death, but instead of the 1000 metres of purgatory down the back of some buildings on my own, I ran this one with the help of others.

You must have heard stories of people who've reported having a near death experience. Where they go down a long tunnel towards a bright light, and at the end of the tunnel there's a beautiful garden, and all their friends are in the garden. And although the garden seems really appealing and full of love, it's not their time yet, as there are still things for them to do, and so they get sent back again.

Well, on Thursday, all along the 3km circuit I ran, there were other members of the club acting as marshalls, maybe one every 300 metres. Making sure I didn't run the wrong way. And they were so positive and encouraging about my running, I felt like I was running towards that beautiful garden Admittedly, I was running down a long painful 300 metre tunnel, but I still felt the warmth and the acceptance. At one point, I could also hear someone shouting my name from across a road, but I couldn't figure out who it was (I still don't know), and while I was looking to the side trying to identify them with my sweaty eyes, I nearly ran into a lamp-post. Maybe that was the equivalent of getting to the post-death garden and finding someone there who you've completely forgotten was ever in your life. 

Anyway, if all runs were like this, they would all be easy. If you could set them up in advance with people stationed along the route to encourage you, you could run for ever. By the time I reached my second lap, people were starting to overtake me, but even they were supportive, and they each took time to tell me I was running well. And so, even being overtaken was fun too. And at the end, more encouragement. And then pizza! 

I've been wondering a lot lately what it is to have a home. I think feeling accepted somewhere is a start. At times I've felt like a wreck over the last 3 months. And when I'm running I certainly look like one. In recent weeks, various people have taken photos of me while I've been running, and I haven't seen one yet where I don't look to be in pain.

But everyone at the running club has treated me like I belong there. So, even when I am half-killing myself at the limits of my physical ability, and hovering somewhere between life and death, I'm still sort of okay too. It's just that the good parts of running don't always show on the outside.

Nothing else I was supposed to carry - Why I run

Part One - Shit

In early July I went on a short break to the Eden Valley. As I set off early one morning on a solo walk up to High Cup Nick, despite being in a beautiful place, I realised that I had become fixated on worrying about something 10 days in the future. I was imagining fantastically elaborate things that could and probably would go wrong at this future date.

And the thought occurred to me, that I waste approximately 80% of my mental energy on shit. About 40% on self-recrimination and rumination about things I've done or decisions I've made in the past, and about 40% on things that could go wrong in the future.

That only leaves about 20% of my energy left to run my life. Sometimes I do succeed at focusing on the present. For example, when I'm writing this, or when I get into a flow at work.  But often my thoughts are dominated by past regrets and future fears. 

In times of crisis, that 80% shit can increase all the way up to 100%

I was in a relationship for nearly 8 years which broke up in May. Immediately after the breakup, I couldn’t stand to be me. I felt embarrassed and ashamed of my life, and the decisions I've made which put me where I am. I hated being seen or making eye contact with anyone, in case I was see-through, and the shit inside was visible, For the first few days all I could think about was what I’d lost, and I wished that I didn't exist. I didn’t know what to do next or where to live, and I didn’t know how to fill the big hole in my life where the relationship used to be.  I couldn't switch off from thinking about how and why ‘everything had gone wrong’. I can’t remember a time when I felt worse about who I am.

Part Two – Happiness

Probably the time in my life when I felt best about who I am was when I was 17.

It was 1985 and I was on a German exchange to Hannover with school, with a group of friends. One evening on that trip, we went to the park, and we met some German soldiers, not much older than us doing their national service. We played them at football, they agreed to play in bare feet so they didn't kick us too much with their army boots, and after the game we all shared a crate of beer. It could have been the beer, but afterwards I remember lying on the grass with my eyes closed on that lovely July day, and feeling 'happy enough to die'. As if life would never get any better than this. And in some ways it never has.

At that point, I was probably as full of myself as it's possible to be. All through school I was singled out as a bright student, and I believed my own publicity, that I was better than the average, superior to most. With no sense of irony, I would quite happily lecture grown ups on their life choices, never having made any myself. I regularly told my step dad where he was going wrong. But it was all theory. I didn't feel any responsibility for the past, because I hadn't made any real decisions, and I had no anxiety about the future, because I assumed it was going to be great, because I was great.

At that age I’d never had a serious relationship, or a full-time job, or my own house, or any real money. I'd never been turned down from any jobs, been made redundant, got divorced, or had to arrange any funerals. No real failures, no real responsibilities.

Part Three – Suitcase

I was recently reading a book by Haruki Murakami on running.

He says looking inside himself is like ‘staring down into a deep well… all I see is my own nature. My own individual, stubborn, uncooperative, often self-centred nature that still doubts itself – that, when troubles occur, tries to find something funny, or nearly funny about the situation. I’ve carried this character around like an old suitcase, down a long, dusty path. I’m not carrying it because I like it. The contents are too heavy, and it looks crummy, fraying in spots. I’ve carried it with me because there was nothing else I was supposed to carry. Still, I guess I have grown attached to it. As you might expect….”

I guess it’s part of growing older that you have to look down into that dark well for yourself. Then you have to then carry the weight of what you find there. Including the disappointment of where your life doesn’t measure up to the imaginings of your youth.

Part Four – Running

How do I carry this weight? Well, running helps. One constant which acts as a stabiliser whatever else is going on around me is the routine of going to parkrun on a Saturday. And regularly going to new ones gives me the added distraction of new experiences. I’ve done 12 new ones in the last 12 weeks, including Wetherby, York, Harrogate, Fountains Abbey and Knaresborough. Oh, and Chevin Forest...

Despite my intention to ‘take it steady’, the first 200 metres of Chevin Forest parkrun was a near death experience. Not so much a run as a desperate scramble into a mass of post-earthquake rubble, as if trying to locate a lost dog in a collapsed building. When I was still alive at metre 201 I thought I'd better keep going for the full 5k. At the finish I scanned my barcode and then lay on the grass with my eyes closed, feeling knackered. I wasn’t so much beside myself, as outside myself.

In those 5 minutes of recovery, there was no suitcase to carry. I existed outside my life. I had no awareness if I was in a relationship or not, where I live, whether I'm a success or not. It was just recovery from physical effort. And all the differences between 17 year old me and 54 year old me became irrelevant.

A couple of weeks later I joined a running club (Roundhay Runners). One of their training nights is interval training. The first time, it was just running up hills for 20 to 30 minutes, punctuated by jogging back down to the bottom of the hills to start again.

After the hills session, I realised I hadn't had a single conceptual thought about my life the whole time I was running. Who I am, where I am, who I'm with or not with. There was only room for run, recover, run, recover. 

A week later it was a pyramid session. A similar thing, but basically running in circles instead of up hills. Laps of the cricket pitch, with short gaps in-between. No time for narrative, just run, recover, run, recover. Then lie down.

Part 5 – Numbers

Someone I live with now asked me recently ‘Do you think you might be autistic?’ ‘I don’t know’ I said ‘It’s never been measured.  I know I sometimes like numbers more than people.  I find relationships difficult, and conflict in relationships almost impossible. But I like looking at football results, league tables and cricket averages. When I was a child, a lot of the books I got out of the library were books of facts, about how tall buildings were, or comparing the wingspan of different aircraft. I love learning languages, but sometimes I’m more interested in looking at the rules behind them than I am in using them to actually talk to anyone, I really like maths because the answer is either right or wrong, and my favourite subject at Uni was Syntax. For my job I spend most of my time at work entering data into spreadsheets and databases, and I’m also one of those fruit loops who records everything he does on Strava and who can’t bear to leave the house without his Garmin, who believes that if a run isn’t recorded, it didn’t happen. But other than that, probably not’.

Compared to the sometime brain fog of my internal monologue, running is safe because it can be measured objectively. When I think I'm achieving nothing, or going nowhere in life, having thoughts such as ‘I’m 54, and I’ve got nothing to show for it, I’ve ruined my whole life’, that’s just speculation, but if I can run a bit faster than last week over the same route, that's a fact. Unlike the aftermath of a relationship, trying to figure out what happened, who did what to who and why. I can say that at a certain time and place, this is where I was, this is what I could do, Stats don't lie. I ran, this is how long it took, that's all.

Part Six - Ego

Eckhart Tolle says that. ‘Suffering cracks open the shell of ego’.

When I look back now with at my ‘happy enough to die’ self from 37 years ago and my ‘wish I didn't exist’ self from a few weeks ago, both seem equally ego-centric. In both states I was literally ‘full of myself’. Full of my stories and of my life drama. And not paying much attention to what was actually happening in the moment.

Now, and often in that period of recovery after running I see my thoughts as something not to take too seriously. No longer a source of pride or distress, they seem more like clouds floating by overhead or a TV that's on in another room that I'm not really paying attention to.

Part Seven – Respite

It still depresses me sometimes to consider my faults and failures, my wrong turns in life and the things I've messed up. But when I run, for a short time I can leave those thoughts behind.

At those times of detachment I wonder ‘How could I possibly assess my life objectively from inside my head anyway?’ It’s impossible. It’s more complicated than looking at facts or statistics. Especially when life gets tangled up with other people’s lives in the messiness of relationships.

I didn’t choose to lose the things I’ve lost, and the things I failed at, I wasn’t trying to fail. And if people have been hurt by my actions, it was accidental. And pretty much everything that has gone wrong in my life, I tried to stop it going wrong. But all those things I did imperfectly, and so the results were imperfect too.

Running doesn’t stop me being me, at least not permanently, it’s just a kind of standby mode for my overthinking brain: respite care for the mind. It’s a chance to realise that the suitcase I carry with me, my stubborn and uncooperative nature, I am allowed to take a break from it and put it down once in a while.

Part Eight – Acceptance

Another Eckhart Tolle aphorism:

“Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy”

I spend a lot of my time and my mental energy fighting against my life story. Fighting against the circumstances that I find myself in and the events that have happened to me, even though there’s now no way of changing them.

But, when I run, for a short while, where I am is exactly where I need to be. And the contents of my life, I carry them with me because ‘there’s nothing else I was supposed to carry’.

Missing Persons

 If a tree falls in the forest and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

If I go for a run, but I forget to take my Garmin and it doesn't get logged on Strava, did it really happen?

If I go for a day out, but I don't take any photos or record it on social media, and no-one I know saw me, was I really there?

I went for a day out in Harrogate a couple of weeks ago. I booked a session at the Turkish Baths, I explored the Valley Gardens, I went there and back on the train. But nobody who would recognise me saw me. I didn't take any photos, and I didn't check myself in anywhere on Facebook. Did I really go?

A lot of my life, experiences I've had have been with someone else there. Someone with who afterwards I can say 'Do you remember the time we went to X, do you remember that old guy in the corner of the pub who was grinning like an idiot at his phone?' It's an adjustment to have experiences that have no other witnesses.

I remember feeling quite vulnerable when my mum died, because large chunks of my childhood were only witnessed by her, me and my brother. Her death seemed to put more pressure on him somehow to be there to verify things that happened. 

When I was married, my wife's grandma (who was in her 80s at the time) told a story of one Christmas, when her father presented her mother with a necklace, which he had saved up for years to buy. At the time of telling the story, she was the only survivor from that day. She would have been describing an event 75 years in the past. At the time it was actually happening it was witnessed by a mum and a dad, and 4 children. But now all of those people are gone. Where did that moment go? Does it still exist because she told me about it? What happens to memories when they're no longer stored in living people?

According to Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse 5, the people of Tralfamadore don't look at time as we do, with moments following each other, as beads on a string, one after the other. They can see all moments past, present and future all at once. As a result, all moments that have existed, have always existed, and always will exist. I hope that's true.

It's an adjustment to have moments, which no one else can see or verify. I think that's why the temptation is always to tell someone, even if it's remotely, via a status update on social media. Not doing that feels a bit like hiding, or living in secret. Maybe that's just because times have changed, and it's more routine now to take photos of everything or to constantly be updating statuses.

I'm pretty sure I went to Harrogate a couple of weeks ago. I could prove it if I wanted by showing you the booking confirmations and the entries through my bank account. I could describe it to you if you like? But you wouldn't remember it. Because you weren't there.