Last week was a little different from normal. I spent most of it travelling, catching up with friends, working on my race car project with a view to getting myself back onto a competitive grid at some point, visiting family and attending a motor racing event. It was a good week, but it was also one of those weeks where the routines I’ve been building became much harder to protect. Food was more difficult to plan, exercise had to fit around everything else, and the weight loss stalled a little.
I’m trying not to see that as a problem. This was never going to be a process where every week looked perfect, every meal was planned and every training session happened exactly when I wanted it to. Life still has to happen, and if the changes I’m making are going to be sustainable, they have to survive weeks like that rather than only working when everything is controlled.
Somewhere in the middle of the week, I went for a run from my parents’ house. On paper that sounds fairly unremarkable, but it stayed with me afterwards because of where I was running rather than how far or how fast.
It’s the house I grew up in. The roads around it are the same roads I spent most of my childhood riding on a bike. Back then I had no concept of training, pace, distance, heart rate or whether I’d done enough for the day. I just rode. I went wherever seemed interesting and came home when I’d had enough. Apart from school cross-country, I’d never really run in that area, although my brother has.
Before I headed out, I told him roughly where I was thinking of going. I only had road shoes with me, so I wanted to stay off the trails and find something around 5km without simply running out for half the distance and turning around again. He suggested a route and advised me to extend one of the loops. I decided not to, mainly because I thought it would add more distance than I wanted. The plan, after all, was only 5km.
The first half-kilometre was mostly about settling into the run and finding a rhythm. After that, the pacing became fairly consistent. Nothing spectacular, but comfortable and steady. That in itself felt encouraging, because there is a big difference between surviving a run and settling into one.
Not that long ago, a lot of my mental energy during a run went into managing the effort. How far have I gone? How long is left? Is my heart rate too high? Am I slowing down? Can I keep this going? On this run, those questions weren’t really dominating my head. I was just moving.
I came back towards the village along what we’ve always called the main road from one of the neighbouring villages, and somewhere along that stretch my watch clicked through the 5km mark. The only issue was that I still had a fair distance to go before I got home. Except it didn’t really feel like an issue.
I felt buoyant. My pace was good for me, my breathing felt under control and, more importantly, my physical form still felt decent. I wasn’t constantly reminding myself to stand up straight, stop slouching or pull everything back together as I got tired. My legs were working, my lungs were working and I still felt composed.
So rather than taking the shortest possible route home, I added another loop in the village. It wasn’t quite the extra distance my brother had suggested earlier, so I’m not going to give him full credit, but it was more than I had planned because I wanted to keep going. I eventually stopped at 7.6km.
What was supposed to be a 5km run had turned into something longer simply because I felt good enough to carry on. That is becoming one of the more meaningful signs of progress for me. The numbers still matter and I still enjoy seeing pace improve, weight change and fitness build, but some of the best indicators are harder to put on a graph.
Sometimes progress is reaching the distance you planned to run and realising you don’t want to stop. Sometimes it’s noticing that your posture still feels good after several kilometres. Sometimes it’s choosing to take the longer way home because you can, rather than counting down the distance until it’s over.
There was also something quite powerful about doing all of that on roads I knew so well from childhood. We were very lucky growing up, and my parents still are. Within a couple of hundred metres of the house there are forests, quiet lanes and well-managed paths that make it easy to get outside safely. I could have chosen any number of routes, but there was something different about running those familiar roads.
I knew the bends, the junctions and the villages. I remembered riding along them on a bike without any thought about distance or time, and now I was covering the same ground decades later with a watch recording almost everything imaginable. The contrast made me smile.
Despite all the data, somewhere in the middle of the run I stopped thinking about the watch anyway. I had some headspace, and that might have been the best part of the whole thing.
Last week wasn’t perfect from a training or weight-loss perspective. The routine was disrupted, the scales didn’t move in the way they had been moving and food wasn’t as easy to control. But I came away from the week with something useful. This journey has to coexist with travel, family, friends, work, hobbies, motorsport and everything else that makes life interesting. If it only works when every day is organised around exercise and weight loss, then it probably isn’t going to work for very long.
A 7.6km run around the roads I grew up on won’t make a dramatic difference to a progress chart, but it reminded me that I’m becoming capable of doing more again. It gave me some space to think, and for a little while I was moving around those roads in much the same way I did as a child. Not worrying too much about how far I was going. Just enjoying being out there.
