On Saturday 24th May, I’ll be running 10KM as part of the Edinburgh Marathon Festival in support of Young Lives vs Cancer who have supported my dear friend’s niece as she’s undergone treatment in recent years. If you have the means, please consider donating here to support the work they do to help her and many other children like her. Thank you!

“I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary—or perhaps more like mediocre—level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday.”

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

“I hate running,” I said confidently to a friend as we walked through the streets of Amsterdam on a Sunday morning last summer. It was hardly a unique statement; I must have said it a dozen or more times in my life. And I stood by it. I had tried, many times, yet each time it was the same. I couldn’t find a sense of rhythm. Parts of my body ached in ways I didn’t know it could. I couldn’t catch my breath, huffing along as I turned an increasingly alarming shade of tomato red.

Maybe it was the lingering shame of the earliest memories I had of running: of huffing my way around the astroturf at school, a little chubby, not at all athletic, and firmly looked down on by my gym teachers for these very reasons. Because at that age, if you’re not willingly wielding a hockey stick or joining the girl’s netball team, then you are not the sporty type and therefore relegated to being bad at sports.

In recent years, as I’ve willingly hiked around mountainous areas of Europe and summited the highest peak of Africa, I’ve held a certain sense of smug pride towards those gym teachers who will have long since forgotten of my existence.

If only you could see me now.

Running, however, remained a final frontier that defied me every time. (Well, that and team sports, but as a grown adult, I have finally lost all pressure in my life to join a team sport and I am happy to keep it that way.) Last summer, not weeks after my latest declaration of hatred for running, I started… Well, running.

They were gentle, not quite three kilometre laps around the forest track by the summer cottage in Finland. They were mostly a way to clear my head in the morning, to get the blood moving, to earn a refreshing cool dip in the lake when I was done. I ran as I was: no tracking distances, no music. I listened to the forest wake up around me. I startled a deer drinking from a pool after the night’s rain. I sprinted when I heard what may have been a bear tramping through the forest alongside me.

Then, I moved in with runners—my greatest mistake. My little three kilometre trails felt pitiful. I tried to do a little more, and didn’t completely fall apart. I still couldn’t really do more than the three, maybe three and a half, without needing to stop to breathe, or to walk for a while. Winter came and I fell off the habit for a while.

Except I couldn’t afford to stay that way, because somehow I’d agreed to do a run. A real one. With a route and timings and a finish line. It was only 10KM but to someone like me? That could have as well been a marathon for all the stamina I had as a runner.

But I’m not one to back down from a challenge, not least when it’s for a good cause. I arrived in Rome. I started a plan. I had the benefit of new surroundings on my side: my morning runs became an excuse to enjoy sunrise over the Colosseum before the tourists descended, more than anything else. I moved to Firenze and there, too, I could enjoy the quiet of Ponte Vecchio in the early dawn.

“You chose a good year to train for a run,” my friend commented.

I had chosen the best year. I never had time to tire of my routes because I was constantly moving. I always had something worth seeing. It became easier to forget how tired I felt or how my legs were beginning to hurt when I was more focused on mapping out new pathways of the city I was in.

Somewhere in Italy, I broke through the first barrier, and five kilometres started to feel as though it wasn’t so far, after all. It started to feel like a short run, like something I could do without needing to worry about it.

For the first time in my life, I felt unstoppable as a runner. The distances seemed possible. Maybe, I could even get faster, so fast that I might beat my current times.

This was more or less precisely the point where my knee gave out. In all this time I’d spent building up stamina in my lungs and in my heart to keep me going the longer distances without needing to stop, I had ignored that the muscles in my legs could only go so far, so fast.

At the time, it felt like I would never recover. I would haul my leg off the sofa, because bending it was too difficult, and hop up onto one leg to shuffle around the apartment. The running plan fell to the wayside. Even short walks felt difficult.

But with time and stretching came recovery. Came understanding of where I’d gone wrong. The injury wasn’t as bad as it had first felt. I would come out the other side.

Last week, I did my longest run to date—the longest of this training block, ahead of next week’s race. 12KM. Almost an hour and a half straight of running, no breaks, no stopping. No walking. I’d broken through another wall and now, running felt… Dare I say it, enjoyable?

Some days are better than others. Sometimes my legs ache in funny ways and I can’t seem to hit my stride. But the days when it works—when it really, truly works—it feels like I am flying. It doesn’t matter that I am a slow runner by any standards, because to me, I could be sprinting. Everything works in tandem: legs, lungs, heart. Mind, body, soul. The wind coursing past as sweat beads on your skin. It makes me feel strong. It makes me feel alive.

I have no intentions of being a long-distance runner. I have a plan to run a 16KM/10 mile race in the end of September, because the route is fun. Maybe one day, I might consider a half marathon, but only if it were worth it for the scenery or the trip itself. I don’t ever intend to run a marathon.

But I’ll keep running, as long as my legs allow, for that feeling that anything is possible. Because if only while my feet pound the path, it really feels as though that is so.

Running Wild