I want you to try and picture the scene.
It's late on a Sunday, 7 p.m., something like that. I'm in my back garden (which is pretty big); it's part of the house that we bought a year ago, which needs about 30 years' worth of work, and will not be finished until I'm long dead, but that's just one of the types of projects of things that, for some reason, I take on.
I'm doing a stretching and press-ups and sit-ups session, even though it never looks like I do any of these sessions, and I'm on my grass with my dog, with my headphones, and I’m working away. The light from the sun, which is getting lower in the sky, is cascading through the trees, through the bushes; it's absolutely beautiful. It's 21 degrees or something, and I'm about to go for a run after I finish this.
My wife is out in the back field with the horses; my kids are at a festival together with their partners. My dogs are happy and healthy; things are pretty good, and so all I'm thinking about while I'm doing this is how quickly I can get to the next thing.
This is a pathology, an illness, some sort of weird modern disease.
I have to stop for a minute and take a breath before I go back down onto my hands and feel the grass underneath my palms and the sun on my back, and the dog jumping over me, having fun, being young and healthy and alive, and not concerned about what comes next.
In the midst of things like this, ‘I want to get it done’.
I want to load it up onto my TrainingPeaks software, go for a run, finish it, check how fast it was, and then sit on my arse, but then today I realised that I was doing that far too much, in far too many places.
I took my time and finished what I was doing because I didn't need to rush because there was nowhere else to be. I changed the music on my headphones, and I ran off up the field through a cornfield where the corners 6 ft high, like the film Field of Dreams.
As I was running along the top of the field, I suddenly remembered that I'm not a bike rider; I'm actually a runner who started riding a bike so that I could do a triathlon. I haven't been able to run like this for 10 years, not fast, not breaking anybody's records (not even mine). We’re just running, listening to some of my favourite songs, but with headphones that also allow me to hear.
I ran for 4 miles, there and back. It was one of the best things I've done for ages and ages. All the way through the second half, I didn't want it to finish. Totally flipped my narrative; it's important that I don't run too much or too far. It's important that I lose a stone before I run anymore, and any minute now I might not be able to run again.
That might have been the last one, and so more and more it's important that I enjoy the right now, not the over there, not the next thing.
Blog Post Number - 4608