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I am getting close to having completed 100 events and I am very fortunate to have been able to run in lots of different towns across the UK as well as in France and Spain. While I have already written blogs about events that have been difficult or not gone to plan, there is one town where I seem to have great runs every time I go there. My memories of runs in the town have always been positive and I have achieved some great milestones there, so it is just a happy running town for me.
Over the last 15 years, I have done several runs in Ashford in Kent, UK and it has been a happy place for running well during events. I ran my first sub-50 minute 10K there. I started to achieve better times after a break from running when I returned there. I have done runs in Winter, Spring and Autumn there, starting from different locations within the town, yet it always seems to go well when I do a run in the town. I have also driven there from different places I have lived in, taking longer on some occasions than others, yet the enjoyment remains the same each time. So, what’s the logic and why is it the case? In the same way that there have been challenges in life and, as a result, it can make me nervous before with the fear that something bad is going to happen again, the same can happen with positive experiences in positive places. Positive memories of my time living in France have done a similar thing. As a result, whenever I am close and see the signs for the town, it brings back all the memories and I instantly start to feel good, making me relaxed and calm, which leads to having better runs. I have spoken to other people who experience similar things of doing better in one place compared to others and it shows the importance of feeling relaxed and feeling good in order to succeed in doing something and being able to reflect well on it. Given my ability to get caught up and not be able to let go of difficult experiences, it would be easy for someone to say that the focus should be put on these happy places and positive experiences. It would also be easy to say that, if I only ever ran in one town, my running would keep getting better and better and all would be good in the world. It is never that simple and it would also get very boring, plus there are other places that could give that same feeling, so how can everything be balanced and the feel good factor be explored and achieved in other places? One city where I have mixed experiences is Paris. I have run two marathons, two half marathons and a number of 10Ks there. I haven’t run there for 15 years but I have had good and bad experiences there. Marathons that went well. Half marathons that happened during sad periods of life and which are associated with coming to terms with different challenges (death of relatives, which made the runs insignificant at the time). For a long time, I would associate Paris as a difficult place for where I did running events, yet I would completely miss the fact that I had some great experiences there and, even in the difficult events, there was still the achievement of completing the event. As I have reflected a lot over the last 6 months, building on wider reflection that I had been doing over the previous 3-5 years, I realised that I made a lot of positive and negative associations to places, where I saw a place as either positive or negative, not balanced or able to see that there were both types of experiences in a place. For Ashford, where I ran really well, it was the place I loved going back to and was always keen to add an event to my calendar. Other places were ones that I avoided and disregarded, only focused on the negatives and never really wanting to go back to. The problem with this was missing the bigger picture and losing sight of potential great places that I hadn’t fully appreciated. This really hit home and was something I was able to address earlier this year when I completed the Brighton Marathon for the second time. I ran it for the first time in 2011 and it didn’t go well, so I made a negative association to running in Brighton (unfair on the town). As part of trying to change my mentality (with a lot of changes occurring and a complete need to transform lots of parts of my life) I decided to run Brighton again in 2026. I was keen to do the marathon again and feel differently about the marathon, changing the way I felt about the event and how I felt about the marathon as a distance (it was the first time completing one since 2013). As I ran the event, I thought completely differently about what I was doing and I made a conscious effort to savour the atmosphere on the day. When I crossed the finish line, it felt great and had gone well, which made all feelings I had for running in the city (from 2011) melt away. What had been negative associations to running in the city became positive and amazing feelings, full of pride and a complete change in how I thought about the experience. We naturally form associations and there are some places we go to, run in and do things in where we feel happy, safe and relaxed. They are lovely places to have and we should always capitalise and benefit from them. However, it is also possible to bottle and savour the feeling we get from these places and try to find them, or transfer those feelings, to other places that can give us an equal amount of joy. The feeling itself is the most important and special thing, so if we can get it in lots of places, it should be the mission to see if we can get it in as many places as possible, savouring it and appreciating what we have, where we have it. Mygoh has been years in development, using experience gained from previous attempts to do a similar thing and taking newer experience and understanding to do it in a better way. Supporting people and helping people to discover new opportunities is very much a passion of mine, always understanding that everyone is different and people want different things in life. The intention has never been to tell people what to do, but the eventual aim is to create a platform where people can discover things they may not have initially thought about, but can discover and see the benefits of as part of exploring other activities.
When I first started to build a platform 15 years ago, the motivation was the same as it is today but the experience I had going into it was very different. I was driven and motivated by encounters and experience from my time working in a running shop in London, where people would come in saying they were not sporty but were doing a marathon or running event. Realising that there was this mentality towards sport and fitness, the aim of the project was to make sport and fitness more accessible to children and families, even by explaining ways that sport and fitness can be done at home. The approach to the project was to give ideas, create downloadable resources and promote businesses and organisations with products and services that would enable children and families to be more active and be able to enjoy doing sport. The online platform had the tagline “Do Sport With a Smile” and I created animal-themed characters (28 in total) as a way to promote and introduce a wider variety of sports to people and show that there are different sports for everyone, not just football. Because of the nature of it being an online platform, it meant that the information was accessible and valuable to people around the world and, as such, I ensured that people around the world could benefit from the info (putting links to national sports governing bodies around the world for different sports). Because of the message I was spreading, I sought and got support through the form of presenting people as ambassadors of the project, which I got support from Olympic athletes, triathletes and professional team sports people. Over the course of two years, a growing audience developed across different platforms and reached a peak of 10,000 followers. In terms of organisations I supported/was supported by, relationships were built with organisations in the UK, USA, Australia, India, France, Belgium and Switzerland. Organisations included activity providers (franchise organisations and local groups), national governing bodies, general sports equipment providers, sports equipment manufacturers, clothing brands, charities and companies that created resources/programmes for schools. Because of the message I was promoting and the audience I built, I was also fortunate to be able to get guidance from and have meetings with important industry people, including leaders at European sports federations, national governing bodies for different sports in the UK and leading sports equipment manufacturers (often, things never went where I wished but there was support for what I was doing and general reaction was positive). Although sport was my driving force at the beginning with the project, I also explored opportunities to widen the attractiveness of the message to people with different interests, I also promoted and worked with organisations offering services and products related to art, music and different crafts. Part of this process led me to seeing the wider possibilities around leisure and involved lots of research to find opportunities that existed for kids. This gave loads of perspective on the amazing things available for children to do and the types of support available to families. At the time of running that project, I was a different person and at a very different stage of life, so my approach was very different and the result was bringing an end to the project after a couple of years. The end came about through a sequence of events. I had decided to start changing direction on the project, wishing to build an online sales platform to sell products themed around enabling children and families to take part in sport and physical activity. I met and was getting agreements with a number of companies (including some established names) when I met a couple who had their own amazing business creating sports programmes and resources for schools. They offered me the chance to go into partnership with them, which was positive at first and I accepted. As time went on, I felt that the opportunity didn’t fit with what I was looking to do and achieve. I also suffered at this stage with “imposter syndrome” and didn’t feel that I was as good as I should be, which led to me struggling to find my place in making the partnership work, so I ended up taking the decision to step away and end the project completely, walking away from everything.. During the same time I had met the couple I ended up agreeing to go into partnership with, I also had an offer to merge into another organisation and get support from them, which didn’t feel right. It became a difficult and conflicting time because I was getting support and people liked the project, but it ended up not fitting what I wanted and was not the true support I was looking for. After walking away, I spent some time with a couple of the organisations I had historically built relationships with, including a company in France, but I found it hard to confidently build what was necessary so I walked away from doing activities with them. Years later, I also had a short attempt to build a similar project but abandoned the idea when I started to get feelings of anxiety as I was getting the feelings of the first project I did. So, having explained the background that has led to me creating Mygoh, what makes me think that Mygoh will be different? As explained in previous posts, my understanding of myself is much better and the difficulties I encountered towards the end of the first attempt at the project are now understood (discovering I am autistic played a large part in explaining the pressures I felt). Being able to identify and understand traits within myself has helped me to understand how to approach and manage things better, which is important going forward. I have also been able to find the original and drive that I had 15 years ago (which I had lost) but put experience with this to form a clearer vision of what I want to achieve and ways of going about achieving this. I have put this vision more clearly front and centre of what I want to do and have set out to focus on creating the things that will help with this vision. Mygoh is, and will evolve over the following months and years to support people in a variety of ways, showing different ways of doing things and offering different levels of support and guidance to help people find the best way to do things for them. Respect and understanding of the fact that everyone is different is most important and, while it is great to see guidance on how to do things, we want to show that there are lots of different ways to do different things, so it is important to find what works best for you. In my pursuit of finding my dream career, I have followed a number of paths with organisations that were doomed to fail from the beginning. Not because of the company, and not because of issues around skills or how the opportunity fitted with what I wanted in my career. Sometimes, there is something fundamental that just won’t work and, no matter how much you want it, it is never going to happen. I have had experiences like this and, at the time, I didn’t appreciate the reality of it not being right. I felt sad and frustrated at the time. When I look back, (it took me years to get perspective on it!) It is obvious to see the issues but, at the time, the opportunities it presented outside of the main part of the role, including career progression, made me blind to the fact that it wasn’t right on a fundamental level.
One experience will live with me forever and is regularly quoted by my family as an experience that was never going to be successful. I applied and got an interview with a retail company selling wine, well established and very successful with great growth plans for the future. It was an exciting opportunity and, from the advert and throughout the process, I was excited by the career progression opportunities and support that they were giving to people joining the company, so it felt like the dream job at that time. Even better was the fact that there was potential for some travel, including to France (I did my degree in French, lived for 2 years in France and wanted to move back at some point, so this connection was also amazing!) so everything felt great and I was well and truly invested in the idea of working for this company. In true “me” style, the day of the interview had its moment in the lead-up. The interview was in the middle of nowhere but, prior to the interview, I had researched the location and, using Google Maps, thought that I could take a train then have a 20-30 minute walk to the location of the interview. What I hadn’t appreciated was that, where the offices were positioned, the walk included walking along a country road with no footpaths and I was wearing a suit/smart shoes that weren’t very comfortable. I had written out the route but, along the way, got lost and had veered away from where I was meant to be walking. Fortunately, I had given myself plenty of time and, as I was walking, a very kind gentleman stopped and helped me by giving me a lift to the offices for the interview. I got there in plenty of time but it was an unexpected excursion and one that threw me a bit ahead of meeting the people at the company. The process for the job interview with this company was always going to be a 2-step interview. The first interview went really well and I got on very well with the person doing the interview. I was able to talk about myself, explain what I had done, what I wanted and how I felt I would be good for the company. I also found out a lot about the company and somehow managed to avoid the thing that would stop me from getting the job in the end. I walked away from the first interview very positively which, unfortunately, made me want the job even more. The day of the second interview was much smoother. I didn’t make the same mistakes getting to the office and I got there, relaxed and on time. The person doing the second interview was as lovely as the first person and I was able to answer the first questions comfortably. Then it happened. I was asked a question I couldn’t answer. At this stage, I will remind you that I was going for a job working for a wine retailer so there are some obvious questions that can be asked. I did a bit of research but it didn’t really help me. The question I was asked was “what is your favourite type of wine?” and I came unstuck at this point. Why? Because I didn’t (and don’t) like wine! As I have said, there are some fundamental things that are essential for being able to do certain jobs and, unsurprisingly, liking wine is one requirement of working in a wine retailer. I tried to make up an answer from research I had done prior to the interview but I think they saw through it and, in the end, I didn’t get the job. I remember seeing the person who interviewed me a few months later. I was working in a shop in Central London and they came in one day by coincidence while I was there. They were lovely to me and we had a quick chat, and it wasn’t their fault that I didn’t get the job. It just wasn’t right for me. I found it hard at the time, and for many years after, because of all the benefits, training and career progression they offered, but it just would never have worked. My family always says “yes, but you wouldn’t have been able to/enjoyed the training” and they were/are right. Once I stopped being blind to this reality, even I was able to see the ridiculousness of what I was pursuing in this particular instance. During my time working as a recruitment consultant, and when meeting people while working in education, I have often talked about different aspects of finding a job and the challenges/realities of the process. One thing that is common to everyone is that it is not an easy process to change jobs. There are lots of considerations to make before finding a new job and, during the process, there are things that we can control but many things that we cannot. Automation can be valuable but can also create a major barrier. Finding the right type of opportunity is tricky and the same role can look very different depending on the type and size of company. As much as everything should be standard for everything, there are some variations that will always exist depending on the size and industry the company sits in. Behind every decision, there is ultimately a person who makes the final call and decides who they will choose and, if there is one role, even if they have five amazing, well fitting people, they will have to find a way of selecting the one person who will get that role. For the person seeking the role, I have always given certain advice which I think is important. The first piece of advice is that, during the interview, you should work out whether you can see yourself working for that company. If you are going to big, grand offices and feeling like it is too big, to the point that it is overwhelming, the reality is that it may not be the place for you. By going into the company and working out whether you can see yourself working there, it helps to manage expectations and give a more balanced feeling for the process of finding a job. We always want to feel like we have done a good job in the things we do and get rewarded each time but, sometimes, it is not possible. When you have had a job interview where you have felt like it is not right, it means that, when you hear the outcome of the interview (pursue it further or not) you can sit there and feel that, whatever the feedback, you didn’t feel that it was right for you. This ability to look in this way can help to manage the overall feelings during the process of finding a job and make it a little easier. The other bit of advice that is important for all candidates is to try to make the interview become more of a conversation. I got this advice from my family and it makes a difference in a number of ways. Firstly, it feels more natural as a way to find out more about the company you are interviewing at. It also helps to give you some control of things as you can build confidence by doing this and you can naturally flow into selling yourself in the interview, promoting your strengths and showing your different qualities. You are also able to ask more questions by making it more of a conversation and this helps to build confidence in yourself as well as helping you to find out more about the company. Not all interviews get the outcome we want and hope for but, by understanding that there are fundamental reasons why we may not get a job or by controlling interviews to help us achieve our desired outcome, the experience can feel and become much better and we can feel happy when it goes the way we want it to. Bear with me as the title is a little unusual, but there is logic (and a lot of imagination) behind the title of this particular blog. It is the best way of being able to explain how I noticed and saw changes in myself and how I handled people, gradually getting worse over time, up to the point where I decided to do different things and change careers, slowly changing and becoming something else entirely.
Because of my general nature, which is being quiet with people I don’t know very well then gradually getting more confident the more I get to know someone/people, it means that going into new environments sees me holding back a lot. It has always been the case and, even after learning more about myself and getting a better understanding of why I am how I am, it is still the case, as I have recently found out when going into a new environment. I am slowly realising that it will always be the case, so I just have to grow slowly and know that I will eventually feel more confident the more that I go somewhere. The challenges with being quiet with people at first is that they will fill in blanks of what they think of you (not necessarily a true perception or reflection of the real person) and I feel quite awkward, which can make me more nervous and reluctant to go back to places at first. The result of being quiet at first with people is that I do a lot of listening and I am constantly looking around, so I take in a lot of the environment around me. In essence, I am a bit of a SPONGE! As well as absorbing a lot of what is around me, I also remember a lot of it and have remembered a lot about many different environments I have been in historically. This is not a big problem in itself but, when you pair it up with the fact that I am quiet and people have made assumptions of me (people have told me in the past that, at first, they thought I was really dim!) it makes for a pretty rubbish mix of things to have to manage and change. When I get to know people and become more confident, I become a different person and a lot more approachable, as well as being more happy to talk about different things. I feel like a different person and come across completely differently, hence why people have been very open with me about their first impressions of me and how they have changed. If I am honest, this is both a good thing and a bad thing as it is great to understand what people think of me and know that they understand me, but I also worry about how I make first impressions and feel pressure going into new environments as I am always mindful of trying to make better first impressions (let’s face it, everyone wants to give a good and true first impression if they can). As I said above, I am a bit of a sponge for absorbing surroundings and this is also true of information, which I tend to retain, so it is hard to let go of it. In the process of learning and understanding more about myself, the journey to getting that understanding was very bumpy. I worked in environments and went into different places where honesty seemed to be OK and it felt like everyone was happy to give me their true opinion of what they thought of me. There are only so many times that you can hear certain things and, having been a sponge and absorbed a lot of it over time, with bits being chipped away (like how sponges get worn over time!) I started to find it more and more difficult to take. This is when I started to feel more like a scourer than a sponge. It sounds like a funny analogy but there is logic behind it (I promise!). If you think about a scourer, it has the soft spongy bit and the hard part for getting the tough bits off of whatever you are cleaning. It is harder wearing but still wears out if you use it enough and it does the hard jobs. It also acts as protection to keep the sponge intact as it is attached and stays attached to the softer part. So how was I like a scourer? Because of the environments I was working in, where people felt they could be honest with me, it meant that I was less comfortable with being open and talking about how I felt. I had done it a bit and was learning to start to do it, but quickly felt that people used it against me rather than using it to understand me. As a result, instead of absorbing information as I went along, I put up a hard surface as a first line of defence (the harder side of the scourer) which meant that I did my job, but it stopped any further information or feelings get through the softer sponge element of the scourer. The more time went on, the harder side came up and acted as a personal layer of protection, but the more it was used, the more it was getting worn down. It also doesn’t stop information getting through, but the idea of showing any softer side was less and less, and I got sadder as time went on. There comes a point where the scourer no longer does its job because it is worn out, grubby and is ready to be thrown away for a new one. While I didn’t throw myself away, I did come to the realisation that I needed to find a solution to stop being the scourer and find a better way to handle things. There wasn’t one answer to this and there were lots of layers to the challenges causing it, but the ability to change and find new ways of doing things was important. One key part of being able to recognise the need for change was having people around me that could see through what was going on and what was happening, helping me to find out what the problems were. Taking on board that support is not easy in itself, but it was the most important thing to do and recognise, and is often the first step in changing things. So that’s why the blog post is titled “less like a sponge, more like a scourer”, but the truth is that it is not great to be either. Being a sponge meant absorbing hearing information including stuff that altered the way I felt about myself, and being a scourer meant pushing people away and feeling unable to communicate with people. There is no household item to actually be like but the key is to know where your personal boundaries lie, make sure that people respect them and learn to balance being open with people but also be mindful of who you are being open with. The last point is hard because you can be open with someone and find out that it wasn’t the right person to be open with, so that is a moment to be kind to yourself and learn from it if you can, trying to spot any potential signs in the future that could lead to a similar scenario happening again. I first discovered the phrase “If it is to be, it is up to me” while watching a sports documentary series on Amazon (All or Nothing: Arizona Cardinals) when the Head Coach at the time of the series being filmed, Bruce Arians, used it as part of one of his pre-match talks to his team. Since hearing it, it has been a phrase that has sat with me and become a personal mantra, including going on a wall as a motivational quote so that I see and am reminded of it every day.
As highlighted by Bruce Arians in the documentary series, it is a special phrase on a number of levels. First of all, the phrase is made up of 10 2-word phrases, so each individual word is short and simple. Yet, when you take these ten short and simple words and put them together, their meaning is very powerful and the message behind it is something to remember in each of the things we do. Quite simply, if we want to achieve something, no matter how big or small it is, it is up to us to make things happen and do what is needed to make it happen. Although that message has been on my wall and stared at me for more than five years, it has only been more recently that I have truly started applying the message and making the necessary changes to achieve what I want to achieve. Some smaller changes had taken place (changing and addressing how I ran and trained, turning the challenging experiences of the past into more successful recent training periods), but in truth, more recent changes have seen me take much more control of the ambitions I have and make the change I needed to make in order to achieve them. During my career, I have been very guilty of wanting to prove myself and do the things to make managers and leaders happy, but I have always hoped that other people would help me to shape my career and give me the opportunities that would help me reach the goals within my career. This has included waiting for people to give me training opportunities and support me through the process or, as was earlier in my career, hoping that people would recognise what I could do and give me responsibilities for things I was passionate about and help me to flourish in showing this and helping people in my way. Unfortunately, what I hoped for never happened. No one came and handed me what I wanted and the training opportunities I wanted were never set up for me. There were two problems with this. Firstly, managers and leaders needed to be telepathic if they were to know what training I wanted and what my overall goals were for my career. Secondly, When even discussed as potential opportunities and presented because of what they saw in me, I would panic and throw wobbles of uncertainty. To try and find the right things that matched what would fit in my personal ambitions would be an impossible task so it is no surprise that it didn’t happen. When I look back and think about why this was the case, the answers are simply that I was scared of failure and not being able to deliver if I got trained, and was very shy in putting myself forward for opportunities. I have found myself, on many occasions in the past, chasing and starting to talk to people about what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it, then fear of what they thought of me and how they perceived me kicked in and I would run away before they could say anything in reply or start to try and help me. This happened several times and only stopped happening when I stopped trying. I chose instead to go for something more simple in my career, starting at the bottom and holding myself back for several years, until the penny dropped of what was going on and how much I had allowed myself to miss out on. So, how did things change and how do I now follow the message “If it is to be, it is up to me”? Firstly, I decided to change careers and have started doing training for the career I have wanted to do (deep down) for more than 20 years. It was the best decision I made as, having got over the fear of doing training and learning which had stopped me for 15 years, I have really enjoyed the process of learning new things and something closely linked to the career I want to do. Secondly, I have started to build and grow Mygoh which, although it is the third time of building something of a similar nature, it is the first time of doing things slowly, methodically and with a large amount of planning constantly taking place to work out the true destination for where I want to project to go to. I also have routines and things I do regularly for it (including the blog) for the first time and a focus on being prepared to develop and improve all the time, which I have feared doing in the past. Thirdly, I do more consistent training for running and do a mix of other hobbies that I spend time doing and I enjoy the process of doing them, savouring them and appreciating them in a way I have never done before. Much of the change that has occurred in more recent times has been about taking control and not fearing this control. The fear of control came from a fear of making mistakes which, while I would like to say it has disappeared, it is still there. It is managed in a better way now but, ultimately, it is not as bad as it was. The bravery of chasing ambitions now outweighs the fear I had of taking control and taking responsibility, so this is a win in my eyes! The ability to take control and responsibility for the things we want isn’t easy. The rewards for doing it are worth it though and, whatever happens, the benefits and rewards of trying to achieve something will give experiences that are far better than simply sitting there and hoping that someone will give you the things you want. So, just remember, “If it is to be, it is up to YOU!” Over the last few years, I have found myself looking at, trying to understand and analysing cycles and patterns that happen in my life. It seemed to be that the same sorts of issues and challenges were happening at the same time of year and I had the same types of emotions (up and down) at the same times in the year. While some of these were good emotions, some parts of the year presented challenging periods and times of real difficulty, the same each year, and I wanted to understand and learn why these happened.
In order to do this, it took a lot of soul searching, reflection and time, thinking back to different points in the past to try to work out what kinds of things happened and why they seemed to happen at this time in the year. At first, it wasn’t about trying to spot patterns and cycles, but simply thinking about what was making me feel sad at these same times in the year. The more I reflected, the more I found that there were a number of cycles and patterns that occurred, which helped to start to make sense of the periods I found difficult. Some of the patterns I started to notice, connected to particular times of year, were easy to spot and associate to reasons for why they occur. Regularly having a “fresh start” in September and January each year or most years (September is classically the start of a new academic year, January is the start of a new calendar year, so that makes sense). Finding periods of the year difficult as there were times of the year with family loss associated with them. Summer coming and the ability to get outside being happy as it means the start of doing different activities I enjoy doing more regularly. While these patterns were easy to find and understand, it didn’t explain everything and all emotions so, in reality, there were still lots of challenges to overcome. In an ever evolving world where things get more complex the older we get, the reality is that understanding what is going on in our lives and unpicking them to help make sense of it takes more time than identifying one or two things. As I looked further inside myself and thought about things that had evolved, as well as the shape of my life evolving (changes in career, personal changes and changes in the things I liked to do), I found more layers of cycles and patterns that needed unpacking. While working in education, I found school holidays to be valuable for taking a step back, but summer holidays left me with a lot of time to reflect and think while also being out of routine (or a changed routine) and I found this difficult. Periods that are typically known as “family time” such as Christmas or Easter were difficult as I didn’t have the parts of family (relationships, kids) that I had wanted but found difficult to get. June and July were becoming difficult over time because there was a feeling inside of needing to set up for “fresh starts” in September and wanting new things for the fresh start, but it wasn’t easy to find these new opportunities and make them happen. These are just a snapshot of things I found when reflecting on challenges and, as you will probably be able to tell, there is a lot there. The reality is that we all have these challenges inside us. Some are better at managing them than others. Some will struggle and show that struggle, some will be able to hide it but be struggling inside, and some will have ways of coping and finding their way through, making the best of what they have. Along the way, everyone may even go through all of these experiences as nothing is prescriptive and things can evolve over time. That is what can be great about stopping, reflecting and exploring what we find challenging. It means that we can re-write the script of our life and make the necessary changes to make things easier and better so that we can embrace more parts of our lives. Once I started to unpack more and more elements of the things I found challenging, I started to experiment with changing those cycles and patterns. It didn’t all go smoothly (some of it went terribly in fact!) and there are some periods where I have learnt that they are just challenging periods (helped by weather and things outside of my control). But, there are periods where I have changed and made the cycles and patterns better, able to do new things without them going the same way as “normal” and able to feel positive with what happens. As part of unpacking all of the challenges, one of the things to overcome was that cycles overlapped and it wasn’t as simple as “January is this, February is that, etc”. There were good and bad things happening at the same time at different points of the year and good things were being affected by bad things. That is where it was time to separate, accept and appreciate what was going on, be more positive about the good things and work out if, how and why the bad things were what they were. If and when you reflect on how your life can feel like it goes up and down, take time and be honest with yourself while searching for those reasons. Remember that challenging periods are usually caused by more than one thing happening at the same time, which is why it is probably a challenging period. You may also associate a period of time with a challenging period in the past, so being honest and reflecting more deeply on this is important. While doing this, also be kind to yourself, see if you can think in a different way about those periods and think about how you could do things differently to re-write how you feel in this period. I often reflect on how much things have evolved and changed through the decisions I have made and the process I have experienced. It makes me smile to think that I have been able to change the way I am based on understanding different patterns and cycles in my life. I hope that, in reading a little about my experience, it may help you to sit down and reflect on how things happen in your life and how you may be able to have more positive experiences in periods that are currently more challenging for the reasons only you will know. In 2009, I completed an autumn marathon in the South of England. It was one of the early marathons I completed and early on in my running journey, so looking back, I don’t think it felt like a big deal at the time and in the following period. When reflecting and looking back on it more than 15 years later, it probably has all the cues that feature in the stories of subsequent marathons and a few added bits of madness to put it up there with the others in terms of madness.
Unlike the other events I have talked about so far, the lead up to this marathon was as bizarre as the day itself and will help to set the scene for what happened on the day. It began with deciding to run the marathon earlier in the year and, after hearing my dad talk many times about how he had walked a marathon when he was 17 years old, I decided to challenge him to do the marathon as well. Having resisted it a few times, he finally decided to do it after watching the London Marathon coverage on TV and my sister agreed to do it with him. As a result, the three of us were going to do the event with my dad and sister walking it, me running it. In the lead-up, I (unsurprisingly) didn’t do much long run training/good marathon preparation and was relying a little (or a lot) on my previous experience. I had run my second marathon earlier that year (Paris in April 2009) and had done some running events, including the Great North Run (half marathon) in September before the marathon, which was taking place at the end of October. I didn’t do too bad in the events I did, but I was not doing the long runs I was going to need to get myself prepared properly for the big event (an event, by the way, that I have seen described as more of an ultra marathon with the hills and elevation involved, which I agree with!) Training was made harder by the other things happening at this time. I had recently finished my degree and was moving back to France, going back to become an English Foreign Language Assistant again, this time moving to Amiens and working in primary schools. Before leaving, I was working in a running shop and just getting myself ready to go out and start what, at this point, was going to be a new and different chapter in my life (I was moving out there to live there permanently). This was going on and I was aware of the big changes about to happen, so I was not really doing what I needed to get myself ready for the marathon I was about to do. All in all, it was a chaotic period and wasn’t going to help with making a great marathon experience. Now that I was living in France, this meant that I had to travel back home in order to do the marathon. I travelled back the day before, arriving home that evening. I had driven back as I had taken my car out to France, so this made me quite tired by the time I got home. I had a nice catch-up and evening with everyone at home, getting ready for what was about to happen the next day. On marathon day, things started interestingly. I went through the same routine before leaving, having breakfast and putting everything on ready for running. We had to leave early to travel the couple of hours it took to get to the event. Not long after leaving, we had to stop the car because I felt (and was) sick! Fortunately, I managed to get out before being sick, but was sick on the side of the road and brought up most of my breakfast. A great start to the day! The rest of the journey was OK but we arrived just in time to start. As a result, it was a rushed arrival to join the pack ready to run. Looking back, it was probably a blessing based on what was to come. In front of me was an enormous hill, the first few hundred metres of the marathon (and last few hundred metres!) which would be a crazy first part of the race. As the horn went to start, this was it. My dad and sister had gone off to join the walkers and I crossed the start line, doing the first stretch of 100 metres before climbing that hill. It was interesting doing it but I did it pretty easily and, once at the top, had to tackle the rest of the run. Certain memories stand out from that day. From the beginning, it was misty with light rain in the air, so it felt quite miserable in terms of weather. I had seen pictures of previous editions where it had been sunny, so it looked very different as a beautiful course but was definitely not like this for the day I did it. Because of the misty conditions, In the first couple of miles, there was an invisible bagpipe player performing as the runners were running along the top of the cliffs. The sound of the bagpipes, accompanied by the misty conditions, made it feel very eerie! It didn’t make it feel any less eerie when the outline of the bagpipe player emerged, as pointed out by a group of runners (friends or colleagues running for a charity and wearing tutus, which made me smile) who were joking about how eerie it was. After getting through the early, eerie miles, it was time to hit the first of the “fun zones” of the course, four long and big hills to climb and descend, each taking about 30 minutes to ascend. I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time (young and naive to running at this point) but I was running with experienced, older runners around me and one of them gave me some advice at this point. They said to “walk up the hills and take them in your stride, then run down them, as there is a lot more to come and you want to save your energy.” I did follow this advice as it would be stupid not to, and it proved to be valuable in the end. Around this point, I also overheard a conversation that still makes me chuckle to this day. Two older gentlemen were chatting to each other and one said “this is my 103rd marathon today. ”The other man replied to this by saying “oh, you’re a baby at this then. This is my 312th marathon.” Oh my god,” I was thinking, while laughing and crying, tackling my third marathon and listening to these experienced guys comparing themselves. As I tackled the ups and downs of the hills, running through countryside, getting wet and listening to the conversations around me, I was also starting to get colder and colder. I was in short shorts and a t-shirt, no jacket, and feeling badly dressed in comparison to all the seasoned people around me. As the miles and hills rolled on, it was feeling more challenging and was becoming a bit monotonous, making it become more challenging. When I hit the third check point of four, at about 15 miles, I did stop for a bit to take stock and psych myself up for the next bit. It helped that there were sausage rolls there (the homemade, good kind) so I took one, ate it, then set off on the next part of the journey. This is the bit that is mostly a blur, apart from a couple of distinct memories. I remember reaching a point where there was a car park, which was where some people were parked to go for a walk along the cliff tops by the sea. The other memory I have in the latter stages was running along the cliff tops in the last few miles. In pictures of previous events, with clear skies, the views look amazing as you run along the rolling cliff tops along the coast. On this particular day, you couldn’t see the edge of the cliffs, it was misty, raining and there was some wind about, and I was tired, wet and, truthfully, MISERABLE! By this stage, I was struggling to tackle the rolling hills, exhausted from lack of preparation and the busy few days before with all the travel, and a little bit scared with the wind and rain swirling around. I was far enough from the edge to be safe but it felt closer than it was, especially when tired. I somehow got to the end of this patch and, fortunately, was very close to the end. The final stretch of the marathon was to descend the big hill that I had had to climb at the start. Being so tired and at the end of a long run, what should have been the joy of descending the hill with gravity was actually horrific and hard, but I did it and, fortunately, shortly after was the finish line. I made it! Up to this point, I had done 25 events and had never felt emotional crossing the line, even after my first marathon. However, this was different! I think that the exhaustion, conditions and general madness of all that had happened meant that, as I crossed the line, I started crying. It had been so hard and I think it all caught up with me. Very shortly afterwards, my mum was there to hand me my stuff, which I took to get changed, but only after being told that my dad and sister had pulled out and were sitting in the car. They had decided that, with the conditions on the day and a couple of other difficulties they had had, they took a local bus that got them back to the start. I was so relieved at this and pleased that they were there, so went off to get changed and joined them to discuss what it was like. The recovery in the weeks after were tough. It took me weeks to feel comfortable walking and even longer to dare to run again. It was an early experience in challenging how to tackle a marathon and going about doing things right (even if I didn’t really take it on board and am only really realising the lessons from it now!!) The key to good running is about balancing many things. Doing the right training. Getting a good balance of running the distance you are targeting (long runs) and faster, shorter runs to improve the way you run/make runs easier. It is also about doing good recovery, eating the right food, drinking the right drinks, and making sure you generally look after your body (strengthening it and stretching). Then there is the mental side! The power of the mental side of running is so big and so important, beyond what many people realise. I have personally experienced this, found it hard to overcome for large periods of time where different blocks set in and limited my potential, yet one activity helped to unlock and change the way I thought about running, helping to give me a wider, longer term perspective of running and the achievements within it. This was Juggling (an unlikely source, but bear with me!)
Juggling highlighted and brought my attention to the barriers I have often put in front of myself when doing the activities I do, highlighting the barriers in different ways. The barriers looked similar but they highlighted the challenges I created for myself and the ways to get around them. In truth, they also helped me with other challenges I have faced (discussed in my blog to date) and helped me to unlock them too, but let’s focus on running and how it unlocked new ways of thinking about running for me. I have been able to juggle with 2 balls (some people would say that isn’t real juggling!) from childhood and I could do different varieties of it. I have also wanted to juggle with 3 balls for a long time, but just couldn’t do it. Every time I tried, I could do the first part of the sequence then my brain would tell my arms to stop. In 2025, I decided that one of my small challenges for myself was that I was going to learn and be able to juggle with three balls. So, every night, I would practice juggling. It became my evening mission and I made sure I could do it. I looked at video tutorials, had a go, kept going back to them and kept going. After practicing every day for one month, I finally cracked it and was able to juggle three balls confidently. How does this relate to my running? As I said, when juggling with three balls, I could do the first sequence then a block in my head kept stopping me doing it. When I was practicing after deciding I wanted to crack it once and for all, the first two weeks had the same problem. I could do the sequence but just couldn’t confidently juggle in a flowing way. I tried different tutorials and one resonated particularly with me. In it, the tutorial said that you have to be prepared to keep dropping the balls, but take the risk to push through if you are going to get the flow of the rhythm. As I was watching it, it made me realise where I was going wrong (scared of dropping the balls, so I would naturally stop after the initial juggling sequence) and, as I started to correct this in my juggling, breaking through and being able to do it, it hit me that this was a problem in many areas of my life, including running. When you read a lot about running training, there is a lot of great advice and programmes to help you achieve your running goal. It is actually like that in most things we do. For most people, many of the things we do are influenced by people around us and, as a result, our introduction to activities is passive and based on observing what others do. The problem with this is that we don’t see everything that goes into it, we go in with a preconceived idea of what we think we should be doing and we want to catch up with the people we are following as quickly as possible. What’s the problem? Things take time. There are shortcuts in the way we can do things, but the best way to achieve things, and do them well, is to take our time and build up slowly, acquiring knowledge and applying it so that we can do things to the best of our ability, at that moment in time. For me, running was very much like that. I started off by running a local event but had my sights set on running a marathon, inspired by the London marathon and watching inspirational, but normal, people on the television. As a result, I built up quickly, did OK and wanted to do more, then worked in the running industry through a running shop and felt the need to push myself to get better and better, not being able to do it like I wanted to (as fast as I wanted to) but not putting the effort in that others did, so I lost confidence and stopped pushing. The fact that I didn’t see the years leading up to things was irrelevant to everyone’s journey didn’t enter my mind at the time, but that is how we see things when we have tunnel vision on something. Part of the challenge through much of my personal running journey has been inconsistency of training and having a long-term vision that takes into account both ups and downs. I have set long-term goals, but assumed that it would be a direct progression, even thinking that I had set a low level of progression for each stage so there is no reason for it to fail. But that is not how it works. The progress can be quick but then you can go backwards or stay static then, out of the blue, you have another jump in progression. It is not always logical either, as the perfect preparation can end up with things going differently to plan and bad preparation can suddenly lead to a result that goes better than planned. The reality is that our brains and the mental side of things have a big impact and this is something we can all improve on. Juggling helped this and the positive impact was transferred into my running. Where I practiced juggling every day and saw the jumps in progression and steps backwards, going back to the drawing board to rethink and refocus on what I needed to do, it highlighted my need to do similar things with my running. I did more sessions (not every day but more than I was doing) and I was much more accepting of sessions that didn’t go to plan. I had a better perspective of what the overall objective was and, when a session didn’t go to plan, I accepted it and focused on making sure that the next session wouldn’t be defined by the last. As a result, with a better perspective and growing confidence, I have slowly got better and improved in running consistently and built back up to doing distances I hadn’t done in a long time. I am not going to suggest that you take up juggling in order to make your world better and help you unlock some magic potentials, but trying new things (and especially achieving something you have wanted to do for a long time) can be a great way to get to know yourself better, find your strengths and weaknesses and create a breakthrough that can transform your life, grow your confidence and help take you to the next level. I recently took a massive step back from what I was doing and decided to completely change things in my life. A series of events led up to making this decision and, while many of these events were challenging at the time, I can now look back and be glad they happened because it has led to me pursuing things I have wanted to do for 20 years.
I know that anyone writing blogs like this says the same thing. I also appreciate that it is always easier to look back in hindsight and find the signs that tell you what to do. It is also not possible for everyone to make big changes without some form of sacrifice and it can be the scariest thing to decide to make change. Having said all that, many people will say that change is the best thing they have done and there must be a reason for it. The trigger for my decision to change was something that took me three years to instigate and do, but doing it unlocked a lot of positive changes and the benefits since have been massive. It is now six months since I got an official diagnosis as being Autistic. I had thought long and hard for three years about a number of different things before going for the diagnosis: Am I autistic? Would a diagnosis make a difference to me? Has the possibility of being Autistic altered my life in any way? What do I expect to happen as a result of getting a diagnosis as Autistic? For a long time, the questioning of myself over the possibility of being Autistic was regular because, in a lot of ways, I am very different to many of the people who have been and are in my life. Looking back, even as far as university, a friend said to me that he had traits of Autism in him and thought that I had them too. Fast forward 15 years, while working within a school and doing a lesson with some older children, one of the pupils asked whether I was Autistic. With no diagnosis and a small amount of “true” understanding of Autism, I answered in both instances, “I don’t know.” I asked myself real questions about whether I was Autistic after I completed a training on Autism and connected conditions through work. During the three hour training, I related to many of the experiences within it and could think about lots of examples of instances that related to my own personal experience through childhood and early adulthood. I remember going back to work that day and saying how much I related to the training and questioned myself about the possibility, but never really followed it up and pursued it further. Why has it taken so long to pluck up the courage to find out? The truth is that, while I thought it would be good to know and help me explain some of the challenges of feelings and actions that have occurred in my life, I was also scared of finding out. To actively pursue and find out that there is something different about you is hard to hear and hard to find out. I was also in the early days of a new chapter in my life, moving to a new area and in a new job, so lots of change and lots of things to deal with. As well as being scared, I also wasn’t sure how it would change things if I did know that I was autistic so thought that there would not be much benefit in finding out. If I could accept it as a possibility and learn to accept myself, that would be a big barrier to overcome and wouldn’t need the diagnosis. I also perceived it, like many do, as a “label”l or a “tag”, which I didn’t want to go down the route of because of people seeing it as me wanting sympathy or support. So, was it worth getting a diagnosis? The simple answer is: YES! By getting a diagnosis, it helped me to look at many of the things I did and do in a different way. I have looked at running (something I have already featured in this blog) in a different way so that, rather than think about how things didn’t go to plan or how I wanted them to go, I now make sure that I savour the process of training, do as much as I can to prepare myself in the right way then, on the day itself, I savour the atmosphere, give it my best shot and accept how it goes. Each time I have run, I have got to the end and felt good because I have enjoyed and embraced doing it, making sure I look around and give it my best shot. In effect, I look at it differently and appreciate it a lot more, and appreciate what I have achieved a lot more. In my professional life, I have made some bold decisions and it has made a big difference. When I was at school, I always wanted to be an Accountant (something else featured in one of my blogs). Having done a variety of roles and having worked in Education over the last 6 years, I made a big decision to leave my role in the early part of 2026. With a new and better understanding of myself and things that I find difficult, I realised that I wanted different things in my professional life and many of these things existed in a role in Finance. One thing that had held me back was the idea of training and studying for qualifications, knowing there was something inside of me that found it difficult but not being able to understand it. After getting the diagnosis in 2025 and properly reflecting on what makes me, me, I decided that, as part of my decision to leave my role in the early part of 2026, I would pursue a career in Accounting and Finance and would start off by doing the qualifications, starting at the first step of the ladder. Any fears I had about studying and learning new things have disappeared and, 3 months into studying for the qualifications, I now wish I had done it 10 years earlier (I know this is something a lot of people say but, as I also said earlier, there is a reason for it!). No-one can ever tell us what to do and everyone has to make their own decisions. Seeing other people have positive experiences and believing that we can do that too can help us to go and do a wide selection of things. I have set out, through The Turtle in the Room, to talk about bizarre and strange experiences, finding a funny side, but also to show that, despite this, there are incredible and simple opportunities in this world. What is simple to one person can be incredible to another person but, whatever your ambitions, there are moments in which you have to give it a go. One person’s scary is another person’s easy but there is always someone who will be there to support and it is not always the obvious person. You may have to go searching and, more often than not, the answer is right in front of you. Whatever happens, there is always the possibility to try new things, make changes and find what is right for you. Whatever happens, the world will keep on spinning and the sun will always come back up! Having reflected a lot about experiences I have had during running events and other mass participation events I have taken part in, my approach to the events themselves and how I think about them afterwards has changed a lot. When completing some of the earlier events, I would feel happy when it went well and frustrated when it didn’t go as well (generally when the time wasn’t what I had hoped). As I was running along, I would have my head down and would be focused on how fast I was going, and would only take in a small amount of what was around me. This was especially true in my first marathon, when I put headphones in and listened to music, not taking in any of the sights around me.
As I got more experienced and completed more events, experiencing more occasions of not getting the time I wanted (something that is normal when you are always chasing PBs and improvement), I realised that the priority needed to change and the way to do this was to pick my head up and look more regularly at the people and things around me (including the supporters on the side of the road) than at my watch and my time to that point. The more I did this, the better I felt at the end of an event and the better I reflected on the event when travelling home. Time is always something that you want to take note of and track as this helps you to find improvement, keep you pushing yourself and helps to get the best out of you at that point in time, but it should never stop you from enjoying and savouring the experience and feeling good for getting to the end. As part of my career, I have worked in running shops and it is always interesting to talk to people about their experiences. It helped me to put context in my own running journey because, when talking to people of all abilities about their running experiences, in particular marathons, many people have stories to tell about the day they ran a marathon and it didn’t go to plan. Two of the blog posts to date for Turtle in the Room have been about challenging marathon experiences, so I know first hand how challenging they are. The reality is that most people have one challenge or another that means their marathon didn’t go to plan, which tells you how challenging it is and how important it is to prepare and reflect on the challenge in a positive way where possible. This is not a blog post telling you how to prepare for a running event or challenge of any size by telling you what to do, what to eat or where to do something. Instead, the preparation I am talking about is to tell yourself beforehand that the aim of the challenge is to embrace the surroundings, savour the support, take in as much of the event as possible and feel proud at the end of the event for finishing. Every challenge that is completed is a challenge for that person. Whether it is an “easy” challenge for you or one that you have chosen that is really hard, it is still a challenge to complete and finish and, as a result, you should savour every moment. The best bits of advice that I can give for embracing and savouring the event you take on are the following:
These are all small things to remember, yet they are also big things that I have forgotten or not done in the past, and I know that I am not alone. It is natural to focus on certain things (time!) when doing events but they are not the only thing that is important and, in the times when things are more challenging, finding other things to feel positive about can make us feel better about what we have just done. |
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