7 Half Marathons Completed In 7 Days & Dealing With A Mental Hangover From The Past
I ran my 7th half marathon in 7 days and that makes 92.5 miles for the week. The strange thing is I’m feeling really fresh and I’ve had to stop myself from running tonight to try to make it a 100 mile week.
Running with and from the past?
I couldn’t sleep last night so went next door to get a Yorkie bar from the grocer. I was behind a guy who stank of booze and was haggling with the tender for Scotch whiskey miniatures. He was starting to get aggressive when the store guy refused to cut the price in half. I wanted to laugh out of nervousness but I did not fancy wearing a knife in my face.
It reminded me of how I was behaving the weekend after I lost the job I liked. That Saturday I had Jagermeister for breakfast, a bottle of wine for dinner and then went into the same grocer for a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream to cap it off at 3am. The cashier was initially gonna refuse my custom due to the fact I was drunk off my tits, but he eventually obliged and it didn’t make me any happier.
In fact it just made me book a week to Tenerife that was fucking miserable.
That weekend came back to haunt me throughout my 7th half marathon, especially towards the end. I couldn’t stop thinking about how badly I dealt with the whole situation and my mind was beginning to drain my body. Because of this I had to develop a new strategy to deal with the mental pain when running. Whenever it becomes too much I just start running as hard as possible so that I can’t fucking think anymore.
I did that for a few kilometres today and recorded my fastest half marathon of the week. Towards the end all of the misery had dissipated and I felt relaxed again.
I’ve been logging my eating habits on Myfitnesspal and since my first half marathon on Monday I’m down 4lbs. I’ve been eating on average 2,500 calories and letting each of the half marathons act as a calorific deficit.
I’m getting stronger, but I’m still struggling to deal with the past in some ways. That’s why I’m glad to have some time off to think about my future and to really come back strong and sober.
If you’ve been enjoying my half marathon challenge, please donate to my Mind campaign on Virgin Moneygiving. They are great with helping parts of broken Britain like me.
what you are doing is pretty amazing (working through your sh*t). but maybe listen to a bit of advice from an asshole with good intentions (me): please don’t hurt your body. just reading about your running gives me sore knees. running seems to be a great thing for you–it would suck if injury sidelined you.