Race Report: Marathon du Mont Blanc
I turned the rest of the race into a game. As with any pain, the less you mentally focus on it the less it screams, so I focused on the person in front of me and would try to challenge myself to catch them in a certain number of minutes. There were no females around, I hadn’t been passed by or seen anyone in around 2 hours by this stage, but there were men near me that became my targets.
Chamonix: The Beginning
‘it was not the perfect start to the trip of my dreams; where training, travel and my own company felt brilliant, free, and powerful. But it was perhaps the start to the trip I needed because I got a chance to fall, to pick myself back up again, and to push on in a stressful and brand new environment around no one that knew me, my history, or what was going on.
COVID-19 and Anxiety Disorders; Unearthing an Unexpected Blessing.
Those of us that have battled and suffered and fought our way through treatment, have more ways to deal with unexpected situations and overwhelming emotions than the average person would ever arm themselves with unnecessarily. So when the world changes in the space of a week, we have a foundation of learning to call upon; from breathing, to meditation, to distress tolerance skills, distraction techniques, and so many reframing strategies that make the rapid pace of change easier to bear. My past and the subsequent treatment has forced me to learn to live in the moment and be okay with not having control over most things in life. I have learnt it's okay to lose my freedom and sense of purpose, have no idea what the future holds, and that there is so much value in pushing forward anyway.
Own your story, but don't resign to it.
The journey from hiding every tear to not at all being ashamed of crying in the most public of places and letting everyone know exactly where I am weakest was not a short one; and it came with its fair amount of detriments and failures along the way. Thinking back, I have been sharing parts of my journey and trying to be 'open' for years, but it is only in the past year or so that sharing has become a holistically healing path. I was first interviewed for an educational TV program back in 2014, and my instagram dates back to before that with what can seem to be openness and truth. Which it was, I hid nothing and was not scared to share the depths of what I was going through, but the motivation for that sharing and the effect it had on me were very different to my motivation and the resulting effects today.