I started running again, and it let the demons in...

I have never been a massive fan of running. Whether it was sports days or the ironically named "fun runs" at school I've always shied away from running, especially anything further than 800m. During COVID lockdowns I started running around my village as a way to keep active when we weren't allowed to leave the house for more than an hour a day but other than that my running experience has only ever been in the pursuit of another sport (football, cricket, etc.)

But this year something changed. My main inspiration for seeing running as something worthwhile is my friend Shaun (you can find his TikTok here). Shaun completed the London Marathon in 2025 (you can watch a video about it here) despite the fact that during school he'd be one of the last people in our friendship group that you'd expect to run for anything. I went to London to support him as well as following his training on TikTok and it was truly inspiring seeing him progress and smash the challenge in front of him.

The London Marathon was on the 27th of April, my first run (which happened to be a parkrun) was on the 21st of June. The time between those two dates is simply a marker of how little the inspiration actually made me think about running. While I could think about how completing a marathon would be cool and challenging, at no point did my brain go "hold on, we probably need to start moving these legs at some level of speed if we want to think about taking on long distances". But on the 21st of June I woke up with my girlfriend and felt motivated to run. With less than 90 minutes before the start time I registered with Park Run, grabbed my trainers and headed out. It's fair to say that experience was humbling.

I completed that 5k in 32 minutes and 7 seconds, a fairly respectable time. What was humbling was how I had to stop and walk 3 times within the 5k. While I felt okay from a cardiovascular perspective, my muscles and joints ached like hell and my ankles had locked into flexion causing cramps up my shins. But I finished it. I'd started with my girlfriend but at around 2.5k she blasted off into the distance leaving me in the dust questioning how this had been my idea. Nevertheless, after finishing (helped by a Magnum Classic ice cream) I felt great! I felt a sense of accomplishment I wasn't getting from my gym workouts and spent the rest of the day feeling smug in my achievement, as small as it was.

Over the next few weeks I swapped my gym sessions to running focused strength sessions and started completing interval sessions to improve my speed and lactate threshold. This has meant that my 5k times have been getting quicker and quicker. My 5k "race" times went from 32:07 to 28:22 to 27:30 to 26:28. The improvements I've seen have been baffling but I've enjoyed every moment, or sort of.

From that first 5k there has been a consistent noise in all my runs. Voices that only I can hear. The voices want me to stop, they want comfort, they want less pain. The question "why are you doing this?", saying "you realise you can just stop right now". This has been the hardest part of running so far. While there is some pain you have to get through to improve, by far the biggest struggle has been my mind telling me that what I'm doing isn't worthwhile and I can just stop. In some ways it's also been the thing that I'm most proud of so far. The main reason my 5k times have been getting faster is my ability to squash that noise has improved. In my most recent Park Run the voices started at around 3.5k, a stark difference to the first Park Run when I'd been running for 20 seconds and considered walking.

And that takes us up to today. In the coming days I am running my second chip-timed race with the Peterborough GP Series, taking on Park Run volunteering for the first time and completing an 8km long run session (the furthest I have ever run in one go)! All this working towards the Great Eastern Run in October.

I will be documenting my journey from "no cardio to half marathon" on social media (follow me on Instagram, TikTok and Strava to keep up to date), while raising money for MIND, because if there's one thing I've learned from running so far it's that our minds don't always play nice.