It’s been far too long since my last blog update, over a year in fact, but the reason for that is fairly straightforward in reason but hard to put into words as it leads down a fairly personal area of my life that I briefly spoke about on social media last summer but have since not had the confidence to talk about publicly. The reason I started this blog was to document my road to recovery having undergone hernia surgery in May 2017 and how I was able to go from that to successfully completing the Frankfurt marathon just five months later and again I find myself scribing a journal recovery from injury, but this time a mental health injury rather than a physical condition, a battle between my head and my heels if you will hence the title. 
Back in May of last year I posted what turned out to be a popular image on my Twitter profile celebrating the fact that I had completed twenty five years working on the railway, everything seemed good in the picture as I smiled for the camera in front of one of the Class 450 trains upon which I spend so many hours week in and week out. But all was not entirely well behind painted smile as clouds of negativity were growing and within five weeks I had a mental breakdown from which I am yet to fully get over, recovery is a subjective term however and I don’t doubt that I have the potential to put the last year behind me but I feel things will never truly be the same and it’s probably best that they are not anyway because then a full relapse will never be far away. What I would prefer is an acceptance of a new normal, but that is quite some way off for the time being. The reasons for the breakdown are manifold and some of it goes back a very long way to a time when you were considered posh if you had a colour television, those reasons are not something I want to bring into public discussion as they involve people who are now unable to defend themselves on such an open platform and that was not really the point of this literary episode in any case. What I am prepared to talk about is how this psychological disorder manifested itself through the summer of 2019 and the following months. Firstly I must credit my wife who was the first to diagnose my signs of depression and also for her insistence (against my will at the time) on seeking professional help via my GP. Up until late June 2018 I had been running quite consistently though not to any degree of self satisfaction, I was running over a hundred miles each month at a fairly swift pace when I wanted to and I kind of hit a peak in late May when I ran the twenty one miles from Petersfield to Portsmouth and had the energy to do more but opted to stop as a precaution against injury. That turned out to be the last long run of the year and my mileage really eased up in June and then stopped altogether a month later. It seemed that the self induced target of running a thousand miles in 2019 had led me to stop enjoying what I was doing and pressurised
me into completing miles that I just wasn’t happy with, I was falling out of love with running quite quickly and then chose to follow some advice I had seen online and that was to become a bigger factor during the autumn which was to stop doing doing things you don’t need to do if you don’t enjoy it. The rest of last summer was incredibly tough, I was off work for several weeks and without the structure and routine that my career gives me it became easy to lose my ability to do anything. Some days I would struggle to get up at all and then spend the remains of the day literally doing nothing as the darkness of depression became all consuming. Eventually I found something to focus on and so I started to scan some of the thousands of film negatives that had been stored for up to twenty years patiently waiting for their turn in my photo scanner, it really wasn’t much but it was a reason to get up and do things and also to once again be able to see pictures I had taken when I was a much younger man. As August drew on I was also admitted as a patient with the local NHS Mental Health service and made a date for the start of a course of counselling and further discussions with my employer’s occupational health team with a view to returning to work during the autumn. Despite being a very difficult month August ended in a most spectacular fashion as my wife and I sailed away from Southampton on a week long cruise to Norway.
The cruise was a fantastic experience, not my first cruise but the first for my wife, and on reflection it was possibly the best holiday I’ve ever had. It had been booked a number of months earlier but turned out to be the perfect tonic as it gave me the chance to completely unwind in the
isolation of a beautiful ship at sea and hundreds of miles from land, no internet and social media distractions just me and my wife cocooned together either at sea or enjoying the sights of the Norwegian Fjords. As if that wasn’t enough we spent week two of my annual leave being whisked off to Paris on Eurostar and enjoying a very warm and relaxing few days just pottering around wherever we wished and made special by a wonderful luncheon river cruise for our wedding anniversary. Those two weeks made such a difference and a couple of weeks later I was ready to return to work albeit in a limited capacity initially. In early October I started my counselling course with six other people, by week two those six had become four but the five of us stayed to the end and it was the comfort of knowing that we were all going through slightly varying degrees of the same thing that really helped me just as much as the counselling itself. Our group became something of a safe space for the five of us to feel we could be open without being judged meanwhile the course itself gave us valuable knowledge to manage our symptoms and in the long run get back to a new kind of normal.
After a couple of months of being back at work I was feeling quite positive once again and I was enjoying not only the job itself but also seeing my colleagues again on a regular basis. By this point I hadn’t run any distance at all since the middle of July but by the start of December I felt good enough to make a start at regaining some fitness, not least because I was a stone heavier than I had been six months previously. Unfortunately I only managed a couple of short runs before I had a secondary mini breakdown brought on by the approach of Christmas and some specific work related stress. Although my mental state improved during January 
I didn’t start running again until February by which time I had added a little more weight courtesy of the excess of Christmas and I subsequently found it very hard going, I still do now but the excess weight is slowly coming off and I hope that once I’m in better shape in terms of weight, muscle strength and cardio fitness I will once again start enjoying it again. Endorphins seem short in supply lately and I’d go so far as to say that I haven’t properly enjoyed a decent run since that twenty one mile leg stretcher through the South Downs last May, but I still yearn for it and unlike last summer I’m confident it will come in due course once I’m in better shape and a little more confident.
While my physical health is on a very gradual upward curve my mental health remains something of a concern, I feel far better than I did last summer but various issues have prevented me from getting on with the second stage of my recuperation which would require a more bespoke personal approach to deal with what may be more of a personality disorder that I have self managed for almost half a century-often at the expense of others. In addition one of the primary ways I found of managing the darker days of the last four months has been to focus on the approach of spring with it’s warmer weather, lighter evenings and opportunities for weekends away and days out and so on, but here we are at Easter with lovely warm weather and we’re all stuck indoors, barred from immersing ourselves in the majesty of this most creative of seasons. The current coronavirus restrictions are not easy to live with and even though I have the subtle luxury of being able to go to work it’s still a difficult time, not least because I’m in a small flat with no garden. I do at least have a decent view from my flat and have been able to monitor the daily movement and shunting around of cruise ships coming in and out of Southampton as they bide their time until they carry passengers once again, including the yet to be completed Iona which we are supposed to be boarding in July although the chance of that happening is slim to non existent, the back up cruise to celebrate my fiftieth birthday in October now seems unlikely too so we’ll probably not have a holiday this year, disappointing of course but in no way comparable the personal loss being felt by many thousands of families as this deadly virus wreaks its havoc upon the world. The last nine months have been challenging to say the least and I am still nowhere near where I want to be mentally or physically, but I can be thankful that I’m still employed and still in reasonably good physical health-extra weight notwithstanding!
Suburban Jogger 