Chapter 1: So I’m running a marathon!
Well, it started off as a Half Marathon – my eldest daughter is at University in Bath and she thought it would be fun for me to come and stay with her and do the Bath Half in March next year. So I thought – good idea. I can run 10k so I only need to double that – I can manage that right? But, being me – a perfectionist, neurodivergent, all or nothing sort of person – I started reading books and training plans and my brain just wasn’t happy with doing something that’s just half. So then I thought – why not use that as the first step towards running a whole marathon. Great – fun goal. Run a marathon before you’re 50 – that’s realistic. 2026 looks good. No – May 2025. So I’m heading to Belfast to stay with my best friend from school (the Engineer) and to run a marathon.
And the thing is I am loving it.
I love running.
I started running just over two years ago using the Couch to 5K app. I knew it would be good for my mental health, my friend (the Doctor) highly recommended it and was a few weeks ahead so I wasn’t entirely alone and I was sold from the start.
But I am facing some challenges –
Firstly – Perfectionism and overwhelm of information
What if I do it wrong? What if I am too slow? I have to do it perfectly – and this book says I have to do this strength training and these drills and that I have to calculate all these different paces and then use them in this way on this gradient of hill and aaaaaahhhhhh. That safe place I had found, that emotional waste disposal system that was super regulating was quickly becoming a new source of shame and self doubt. It was quickly turning into another area to judge myself super harshly in. To fail in. Because not perfect = failure. Well it doesn’t – but my brain keeps misplacing the memo.
So my biggest challenge was always going to be mental – I had to find a way of training sustainably and effectively for what I wanted to achieve and to do it without stealing all the joy.
Secondly, and more practically how was I going to fuel myself for this marathon?
I have ADHD and I struggle to order and process and filter information and there is so much information out there and every time I dip into it I quickly retreat. For example – apparently I need to know how much I sweat and how salty my sweat is. Armed with this information I can then know how much to drink and what to drink. But this is the level of detail that I know will tip me into the mental red zone mentioned above.
To further complicate things, I would like to run my marathon without consuming anything processed or containing sugar. There is a lot less information on this – which ironically doesn’t help – because it is just not very clear if this is possible and if so how. It means that the manageable and safe for my brain black and white rules – like this many grams of carbohydrate at these intervals – i.e. eat one of these every 45 minutes… are not really options for me. So I think I need to read all (correction – a selection of) the stuff on what people normally do and then try and work out what I need to do instead. And I need to do this without becoming obsessive and compulsive, and feeling like a failure. Which is how I tend to experience the ‘I don’t know and I might get it wrong’ zone. This then quickly becomes the ‘Who am I kidding, I am an idiot and should just stop everything now’ zone.
So my challenge is to allow myself to learn about it step by step and see what happens. And my method for that is to impose my journey on you in the hope that I will actually allow it the space to be a journey – with all the twists and turns (including u-turns) that that may entail.
