One Foot in Front of the Other

This morning I slipped my running shoes over my feet, secured my ear pods and walked out of my front door into the calm morning air of the once bustling town in which I live.

It was the first time I had attempted a jog in several weeks. After a six-year battle against M.E/CFS, at the end of which I discovered exercise was the ironic key in eliminating the onslaught of mental and physical fatigue-related symptoms, I fell in love with physical movement. I had spent years moving between laying in bed and laying on the sofa, too weak, too sensitive, too much like an exposed nerve to tolerate anything more than quiet daytime television and frequent naps. As my body had adjusted to movement, I became restless and greedy for it. By the time I was fully recovered, in 2017, I was playing rounders and badminton every week, attending yoga and aerobic exercise classes, and owned an elliptical bike of my own. Exercise had moved from being impossible to being the great motivator of daily life, energising me for whatever that day might hold.

It wasn't until 2018 that I began jogging. A friend and I had signed up to a 5k fun run - Glow in the Park at Longleat House - and I knew I was woefully unprepared. Despite my general increase in exercise, my body clung to the weight I'd piled on over my years of incapacity and I had never really learned to run. I started small jogs in the weeks before the 5k, but when the time came for me to cross that start line, it was a far greater slog than I had anticipated. After jogging the first kilometre, I was forced to speed-walk most of the remaining route. By the time I finished I was colder than I had ever felt in my life (thanks to a combination of late September country air and water pistols of luminous gunge that had been fired at us throughout the run), but something in me had been sparked. I wanted to do this again - and I wanted to do better.

My friend Clare and I began jogging regularly in early 2019. Despite freezing temperatures (in which I lumbered along in two pairs of socks, two pairs of leggings, 3 tops, gloves, scarf and jacket, while my friend managed in leggings, t-shirt and jumper. I feel the cold badly), we kept it going two or three times a week. By the time we did our next fun run - Pretty Muddy in Exeter in July 2019 - I was thinner, fitter, and able to run the majority of the route. As soon as it was over, we planned our next run: a 10k inflatable run, in late April 2020. Although it was still difficult to coax my slumbering, not-a-morning-person self from bed on my jogging days, I had developed a deep love of the 'runner's high'; that overwhelming euphoria that often strikes after a great run. In those moments I felt invincible. Proud. Joyous.

Then the coronavirus hit. With the country on lockdown, our fun run was, understandably, cancelled. Unable to run together, my friend and I both lost our motivation to maintain a running schedule. The differences that defined our exercise styles - she couldn't run first thing in the morning, but I couldn't run in the evenings - meant that even jogging over a live chat feed was out of the question. We had signed up to gym classes in February, which now took place over Zoom three days a week, and continued to do those, but our former love of jogging had vanished in a haze of awkward social distancing around dog walkers, fellow joggers and cyclists, and the sort of complacency that occurs naturally when someone is forced to spend their time indoors.

But this morning, as I ignored the temptation to once more abandon a jog in favour of an extra hour in bed, I stepped out onto the concrete path, pressed play on the my audio book (Jessie Burton's 'The Confession') and began tentatively moving forward through my old routine - a fast walk until I reach the end of the road, then a steady pace for as long as I can stand it. It was incredible how easily it came back. Despite weeks of confinement, the first time I checked my Fitbit to see how long I had been running, more than twenty minutes had passed. I grinned to myself. A scent of woodsmoke hung in the air, the birds were chattering away loudly enough to be heard even over the melodic tones of Hayley Atwood's reading, there wasn't so much as a breath of wind but the air was cool and fresh as I wound my way through a small woodland, delighting in the soft spring of the earth beneath my feet.

By the time I reached my front door, I was red, sweat was pouring down my face and back and my breath was ragged from the exertion. In short, my body had worked as hard as it could for a good forty minutes, and as my heart rate gradually slowed, that familiar euphoria set in; the absolute certainty that the day ahead was mine and lockdown or no lockdown, I could achieve everything I had planned for that day. Because when you make a deliberate, healthy choice early in the day, it sets up your body, your mind and your soul for the hours to come.

And while lockdown continues to force us to reconsider how we want to live and who we want to be in the changing world around us, that hour spent freeing the mind and moving the limbs not only maintains a sense of health and wellbeing, it also reminds us how powerful we can be, and how much we can achieve if we just continue putting one foot in front of the other.