This will probably be the only genuinely important blog I
ever write! As much as I love sharing my
largely pointless efforts to bust myself in the outdoors in a semi
self-aggrandising and semi-therapeutic way, it’s all really just for fun. This one actually matters.
My old school mate Kevin Carr is running around the World,
in fact he’s nearly finished! He’s given
a great recent account here (http://team.inov-8.com/race-against-time-world-record-run/). He’s a really interesting character. I knew him from school and riding bikes way
back in the mid 90’s but then lost track of him for over a decade. We met again at a mutual friends’ wedding and
he filled me in on life in-between. He’d
recently become the first (and only) ever person to run from Lands End to John
O’Groats unsupported and entirely off-road.
Averaging over 30 miles a day for 40 days he took a winding and
convoluted route through some of Britain ’s most beautiful and
mountainous terrain, avoiding asphalt and sleeping in fields and ditches. He was meant to have a support crew but when
that fell apart at the 11th hour he just packed some more kit and
went for it.
Naturally I was intrigued to know what was next for Kev and
he had some ‘interesting’ ideas of how to push himself physically and mentally
through his limits again. We stayed in
touch and so I came to learn of his ground breaking attempt to become the first
person in history to run around the World entirely unsupported. It seemed like a logical step for a man so
used to pushing his personal limits.
Obviously physically running that distance is an immense challenge but
choosing to do it with no support structure around him has made it infinitely
harder. When he got hit by a car in Perth and the buggy full
of kit that he pushes was damaged he sorted it.
When he was struck ill in Belarus and left with 90 non-stop
miles of running through a blizzard to reach the border before his visa expired
he dug in and got there. When he was
temporarily blinded in India
by tiny bits of slate hitting his retinas he dealt with the pain and fear until
his sight returned. He has run an
ultramarathon virtually every day for over 18 months through every condition
imaginable. No time to form
relationships, no time to stop and recover, no time to feel sorry for himself,
no support crews or liaison officers to send him fresh kit and smooth his way
through the myriad of bureaucracy he faces.
In short he is a hardman, physically and more importantly mentally.
Kevin has also lived with a lifetime of depression and
mental illness.
He won’t mind me telling you this, in fact, he’d actively
encourage it because part of the point of his run has been to help break down
the myths surrounding sickness of the mind, remove the stigma and prove with
resounding finality that depression is not a mental weakness. Finding this out about Kev really heightened
my interest in his challenge as, along with a love of running and physical
adversity it’s something we both have in common.
I too have suffered from a mental illness since about the
age of 18. It’s been a combination of
anxiety disorder, depression and bipolar all mixed up in a complex and
interrelated set of causes and symptoms.
I don’t mind sharing this with you either because I’ve confronted the
issues myself and come out much better with the support of some brilliant
people. What I would like to do is share
a bit of my story in the hope that it might help someone else realise that they
too should seek some assistance and improve their own life exponentially.
First let’s dispel some myths.
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| Life is good, chasing dreams! |
I have a great life.
I have an incredible, caring, loving wife. I have two funny, affectionate, intelligent
kids. I was brought up in a loving
family in a beautiful part of the world.
I like most aspects of my job and absolutely love some parts of it. I live in a nice house in the mountains, have
no real money worries, buy all the shiny bikes and kit that I need (and plenty
I don’t need). I get to go on some great
holidays, chase some dreams and follow my interests and ambitions. I have no real interest in or longing for
further material wealth. In short, there's no reason why I should ever be unhappy.
And I haven’t been unhappy.
I’ve been ill.
I’ve had various symptoms, real physical symptoms, often
mild but sometimes serious. Low periods
don’t involve feeling a bit grumpy or down, it’s like a physical weight on my
shoulders to the extent that I can actually feel it coming for a couple of days
in advance. During the following unspecified
period the things that usually make life so good don’t seem to matter. It’s not a feeling of sadness, or grief, or
anger, worse than that, it’s a total nothingness. Love, happiness, laughter, music, nature,
biking, running, mountains, all these things that are inherently so life
enhancing for me under normal circumstances do nothing to raise me from that dulling of my
senses.
I’ve also had many periods of crushing stomach pains,
vomiting, curled up on the floor unable to stand up types of pains. These have been recurrent from my early
twenties but again, it’s only recently that I’ve realised that every one of
them was linked. Intense physical
symptoms of a mental illness caused by anxiety.
There’s a flip side to the downs, for short stretches in the
past I’ve experienced incredible natural highs that made me a completely
unstoppable force, achieving amazing feats with limitless energy. They felt great but were ruined by my
knowledge that they invariably preceded deep lows. I don’t really experience these any more, the
extreme ends of the scale have disappeared.
If I hadn’t eventually sought some professional help I’d
still be unaware that all these factors are so interlinked. With some gentle prompting I finally arranged
some counselling and took a big step towards getting my mind in order. That was really daunting, finally admitting
to myself that all wasn’t perfect inside my head even if all is good outside
it. I couldn’t imagine how the session
would go, would it be like a TV psychiatrist, me lying on a couch and them
listening and nodding as I babbled on? I
really couldn’t envisage me being able to talk for more than five minutes, let
alone an hour! And yet I did. It felt a bit self-indulgent at first, I felt
like a fraud. Why should I be here
wasting this lady’s time when I have all I could wish for in life? But I talked, and talked and it just flowed
out and it was incredible how an hour seemed to last just a couple of minutes. I learned to self-analyse, to recognise the
triggers, early warning signs that the illness was coming on and began to
develop coping strategies to sidestep the lows.
And it’s made a huge difference.
I feel so much more in control and relieved that I now understand
something that has challenged me for much of my adult life.
You may well know many people who are silently going through
exactly the same things I’m describing.
I’m sure I do. Maybe they aren’t
aware of it or like most people who suffer from depression they are extremely
adept at hiding it. We hide it because we’re
ashamed, embarrassed, don’t want to be a burden to those we love and because we
don’t want to be seen as weak.
Weakness, mentally weak, unable to cope with life, that’s
what I was starting to think of myself. And
yet I’m definitely no failure. I choose
tasks and complete them, see them through with a dogged level of
determination. I wanted to work as a
bike tutor and coach and now I write the courses for the National Governing
Body. I took up running in the mountains
three years ago, started racing and was representing internationally within two
years. I’m fit, healthy and live very
well but still I suffered a mental illness.
Depression is sometimes called ‘the curse of the
strong’. Think about that for a
second. People who are prone to depression
are often the ones who bottle emotions up, take the world on their shoulders,
internalise, hold it all together so that others around them can be expressive
and let go. My biggest crime in terms of
personal attributes is simply that I’m a perfectionist in an imperfect
world. Things that most people wouldn’t
even notice cause me to wince internally and that pressure builds up as a
physical knot in my stomach until the full blown anxiety hits me, followed by
the lows as my head goes offline for a bit to recover. It’s a really useful trait for many purposes
in life and accounts for many of my successes.
Having an overactive attention to detail has also definitely helped my
approach to delivering courses and coaching individuals but it has its very
definite drawbacks too.
Anyway, enough about me, back to Kevin Carr.
If someone possessing his superhuman powers of physical
ability and mental fortitude still can’t control whatever it is that
causes the darkness of depression then whoever you are, you should never feel
weak because you can’t too. Kev has
attempted to end his life in the past.
I’m one of many people who’s delighted that on that occasion he was a
failure.
I’m excited to be joining Kev for some of Irish leg of his
World Run. He’s running from Shannon
airport to Belfast
City South
America but with a better pint at the end. For me it’ll be five or so back to back days
of running double the distance I’ve ever run in a day before. I don’t run marathons, they simply don’t
interest me and so doing a double marathon every day for five days will
undoubtedly hurt, a lot! I’m not going
to train my body for this because I want the power and drive to come from my
mind. In a miniscule way I want to
experience the emotions that have become Kev’s life. And like Kev does, I want to prove that I
have an extreme mental strength and not a mental weakness.
We’re going to get freezing cold, wet and run through
darkness which in a masochistic way I know I’ll enjoy. It would however be a shame not to have some
genuine good come of my efforts and so I’m going to try to tap up you lovely
people for cash! Kev has been running
for ‘Sane’, the mental health charity and I’d love to donate as much as possible
to them too.
Follow this link (http://hardwayround.com/donate-here/),
donate a couple of quid and you never know, you may be indirectly helping a
neighbour, friend, family member or even yourself.
You can follow Kev’s progress on his site hardwayround.com. There’s a live tracker so you can see where
we are on what night if you want to donate a Guinness and a foot massage!
Sane - http://www.sane.org.uk/
Lifeline – 0808 808 8000
Hard Way Round - http://hardwayround.com/
Kev’s Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/HardWayRound?ref=br_tf
