Halfway!

Finishing marathon number 25

Halfway!Maybe an odd title for a first blog.

But, I am halfway to a big target – doing 50 marathons by age 50, which for me is in May 2015. Quick maths, and yep, that’s just over one marathon a month for the next two years.

I only decided to make that my goal, having run my 10th marathon, New York 2011, so the past 18 months have been a bit full on chalking up the numbers.

You may think that commitment alone qualifies for the “Obsessive Compulsive Running” title of this blog. But I don’t really see myself as a committed runner, and certainly not an athlete by any stretch of the imagination. I’m just an old plodder who likes the thinking time and free space you can lose yourself in on a long distance run.

Running helps me escape the hamster wheel of thoughts and images whirring all the time inside my head – questioning, checking, trying to make sense of the crazy internal kaleidoscope.

I’ve always thought I was a bit mad, a bit weird, a bit different. Sentiments, that my non-running friends in particular have used to describe me many times.

Recently I’ve discovered that yes, whilst I am a bit different to many people, I’m not totally alone in the way I interpret things. I’ve recently been diagnosed with OCD – Obsessive Compulsive Disorder – a mental health condition that affects around two in a hundred people.

It was quite a shock – even after years of sometimes desperate deep despair – to learn I had something identifiable. Something specific. Something with real symptoms which I experience in my daily life.

What’s encouraging though, has been finding out that it can be treated. In fact, I am currently in therapy and it’s already helping.

So my blogs are going to be about living with OCD and running a marathon a month over the next two years – which incidentally I’m doing in aid of the dementia research charity BRACE.

Dementia, now there’s another big topic, which forms part of my OCD anxiety.

Still, plenty of time to write about all that in future blogs – in between training, therapy, and my usual obsessing about this, that and a galaxy of thoughts.

Thanks for reading! Until next time……….