Sisyphus rides again. When it comes to health and wellbeing, I work a kind of shift system. 4 days on, 3 days off.
Last Friday, after the previous evening’s life-affirming jog-climb in Wharfedale, the culmination of a week of good, interesting running and textbook nutrition, I was at the top of my game. Yes, I was knackered, but nice-knackered. Post-coital nice-knackered. Finished-digging-a-bed-and-planting-all-your-veg nice-knackered. End-of-a-race nice knackered. So keen and enthusiastic did I feel, that my eyes must have looked like headlamps, shining into every dark corner of my daily routine, illuminating every work problem, sweeping out every last shred of pessimism. All was alive and alert and crackling with healthy appetite. I’d lost 5 pounds in 4 days. I was a walking advert for the benefits of moderate exercise and a healthy diet.
Then Saturday appeared, and it was time to relax a little. After an indifferent afternoon run, some beer seemed a harmless idea. Then a few glasses of wine wouldn’t hurt. And some late-night Stilton. And ice-cream. I’d pushed open that door again, and here I was, descending the helter skelter in the darkness. By Sunday, all resistance had been dismantled. A bad day, followed by a worse day on Monday (yesterday), leaving me 6 pounds heavier than Friday, and feeling lifeless and bored.
So near, yet so far. It’s like the prayer of the convent girl: “Please God, make me chaste. But not just yet.”
It’s given me plenty of food for thought, and I’m struck at the similarities between this and stopping smoking. I tried for years to give up cigarettes. Short bursts of abstinence, during which I felt holy and elated. Then a sudden crumbling of resolve. “Just one won’t hurt.” Followed by an unstoppable avalanche of poisons to sweep me back to square one. Eventually, my patience ran out with these wild oscillations, and I stopped by taking a more measured, cerebral approach. It finally worked. There’s a lesson there.
One of the problems with my approach to stopping smoking, I realised much later, was that I never really believed that I wouldn’t smoke again. The thought actually consoled me somehow during the withdrawal period. “It’s OK, it won’t last forever”. Utterly self-defeating, of course. Resolution, clarity of purpose, have to be the foundation of any attempted change, and if it isn’t there, or if it’s made of blancmange, the outcome is predictable. It seems many of us do the same with eating and drinking badly. Perhaps I haven’t quite decided, or realised, that this should be a permanent change, instead of just some temporary deprivation in the approach to a race. I can happily go days, weeks, without alcohol, but when I do drink it seems to change my entire attitude to eating. If I’m enjoying some decent red wine, it seems unreasonable not to eat well too, though ‘eating well’ usually means the exact opposite in practice. And once the door has been pushed ajar, that’s it. I go crashing through it without investigating what might be on the other side.
It has to stop. It will stop. But please, God. Not just yet.
Today was heading down the same black hole as the weekend, but I managed to turn it round. A stodgy lunch and a few afternoon raids on the chocolate machine, and there I was, almost writing off my running plans for the week. Then an emailed invitation arrived. Did I fancy another walk/run in Wharfedale tomorrow night? My instincts were no, but then I saw that someone may be throwing me a lifeline here, so I mailed back to say OK.
My problem now is that I have 24 hours to ‘get my head right’, even if my body won’t be. So I did what I had to do, and what I didn’t feel like doing at all. I went for a run.
It was one of those bloated, bouncy, bilious plods, and took me up the Wakefield Road for a couple of miles. It was good to run in the rain again. I haven’t seen a pavement sparkle like this, or heard that shallow puddle-slap sound, for weeks. And drizzle was just the right weather to accompany the view of Sainsbury’s and the canal, and all those grim little second-hand shops that no one has ever been seen to enter, or more worrying, to leave. Two miles took me past the Tolson Museum, the town’s cultural and historical archive, and a place I’ve still not visited, to the fork in the road where the driver has to make that rather uninspiring choice between Sheffield and Wakefield. Perhaps I was making a statement, but it was here that I stopped, turned, and began the return journey.
Nearly 4 miles, feeling like a decent vomit here and there, but managing to hold it in. Got back, showered and changed, and felt suddenly much better prepared for the week.
