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Breaking up is hard to do

The first few weeks went great – you feel the nervous anticipation of meeting for the first time, you hope that you’re everything they’ve been looking for, the excitement of something new and exciting, desperately trying to ensure everything you say and do is met with approval and interest.

You’re completely on it – you’ve never been so confident, so witty, so engaging.

You’re getting close to that pivotal moment, where you’re ready to take the next step and make this a long term commitment – then, out of nowhere it’s over.

You’re dumbstruck, numb.

You know what’s just happened but somehow it doesn’t feel real and you start to feel all the hopes and dreams, the future that you could have had crumbling in front of you.  It’s not you, it’s them, and you’re just not what they were looking for.

You’ve just lost your job.

If you’ve never been there, you can’t appreciate the gravity of suddenly going from boundless opportunity to the crushing reality of not being able to pay your mortgage – from having your hands firmly on the steering wheel of life to suddenly feeling like you are standing on the edge of a big black hole.

The thing about it is – that even if you are well prepared for the financial, social and lifestyle impact of going from being employed to without warning spending your days lying on the sofa wondering where the last six months of your life went, there is very little that can prepare you for the emotional impact.

The loss of purpose, the loss of identity, the constant questioning – what did I do wrong? Where do I go from here?

It’s not as though you can forget your worries with a night out on the Pinot Grigio telling anyone that will listen that ‘you can do better’ and ‘you never really liked them anyway’. Beyonce can’t get you through this one with a few rousing choruses of ‘Who Run The World?’ and there’s no make over montage to the sound of Gloria Gaynor singing ‘I Will Survive’ that can force someone else to employ you.

So this is the situation I now find myself in (through no fault of my own I might add) – unemployed, betrayed and bitter (at least for now). My time is divided between searching for jobs, asking myself why I didn’t make better decisions in my youth (that college course in popular music really wasn’t the most well thought out choice) and telling my cat, who is now the only living being that can’t escape from my self-pitying cries of anguish – mainly because I’ve barred all routes of escape – about how much potential I used to have.

My family income has reduced by 60% – being the higher earner in the family comes with a whole myriad of emotional pros and cons – I hadn’t recognised the impact that losing that identity would have on my sense of purpose and importance. I.e. I am no longer an important and valid part of our tribal system.  No longer can I claim the roomiest wigwam or the biggest chunk of bison. Instead I am relegated to the role of feeble and incapacitated former hunter gatherer, a patchy old lioness sitting at the back of the pride unable to provide her cubs with tasty bits of zebra. Unemployment has meant a cut back on food so that may explain the constant meat based analogies. I can’t shake the feeling that eventually the rest of the pride will recognise my inability to contribute and move on, leaving me to find a quiet spot in the forest to die in so my carcass can be picked apart by scavengers.

Yes, it really is that melancholy.

Knowing you are unemployed and looking for a new job is entirely different to being in work and looking to move to another company or role.  Just for starters there is the whole issue of being asked WHY you are suddenly unemployed. “Well I was just too accomplished for them” is not a viable answer.

Internally you’re torn between screaming “Because they betrayed me! I loved them and they broke my heart, it wasn’t my fault and I did nothing wrong!” and writing ‘Soiled Goods’ on your forehead in black marker pen.  In reality you go for something that is half way between the truth and a big fat whopping lie i.e. “It was a great experience but they decided to go in a different direction meaning my role was no longer viable.”

They don’t believe it and neither do you.

The burning need to apply for everything and anything takes over your whole body until you reach the point that you’re compulsively sitting awake at 3am scrolling through job sites getting momentarily excited about a 12 hour a week job in a bingo hall in Droitwhich until you realise that you’ve spent the last 5 years working in transport and logistics and you live in Southampton.

Where a lack of experience in your youth can be an obstacle to getting that first rung on the ladder firmly beneath your feet, in contradiction an over abundance of experience can be even more devastating when you suddenly need a new source of income.  If I had a pound for every time someone said to me that I was clearly over qualified or too experienced for a job I’ve applied for I wouldn’t need to be looking for a job.

In blind panic you start thinking over ways to make your own money. You see it all the time, people all over the internet who threw off the shackles of the 9 to 5 and now support themselves by making and selling bespoke dog marquees for canine social events.  This is the point where you start wishing you’d developed a useful skill at some point in your life.

Lying in bed with my husband – who incidentally as a nurturing and supportive partner gets all the benefits of my stress-induced insomnia – I ask him “If I were to do something independently to make money, what do you think I’d be good at?” Following an in depth discussion revolving around a job that mainly involves rotating cupcakes in glass cabinets to ensure they don’t get sun faded (don’t ask where he was going with that one) he suggested writing.

My first reaction was – I can’t make any money out of writing and I’m not going to do it.

He’s actually not the first person to suggest it funnily enough; it’s something that has cropped up numerous times with various people over the course of the last 20 years.

I am fairly sure that it’s a prerequisite to be young, cool and interesting to be a writer, or at least to be a writer who’s writing which actually get read and I definitely tick none of those boxes. Blogging years are like dog years so at 32 I have the equivalent blogging age of Dame Maggie Smith.

However on the basis that blogging seems like a far more viable option than my only other money making idea, here I am.

On a side note, my other idea for making money was to launch my own ‘Rent-A-Douche’ business model (to clarify we’re talking the Americanism  for an obnoxious person not the intimate hygiene apparatus) – an alternative to the expense and bloody finality of ordering a hit on someone you can level down by paying to have a total douche bag inconvenience the party of your choice, for example the lower level of service gets you 30 minutes of standing in front of a long queue at a coffee shop ordering a number of extremely pretentious drinks and asking the barista about the health benefits of each one and what their ethical trading policies are just in front of the person you want inconveniencing.  For the premium service they’ll actually book into the same holiday resort as your chosen victim and spend a full week trying to recommend artisanal pale ales to them at every opportunity. I’m pretty sure there’s a gap in the market for the service and it would provide a cheaper and more moral answer to conflict than hiring an actual hit man.

N.B. Earlier in this post it may have been suggested that Dame Maggie Smith is 224 years old, I’d like to clarify that Dame Maggie’s age has been exaggerated for dramatic effect and I am not actually suggesting she is in fact centenarian. She is however a magnificent example of womanhood and success and in honour of Maggie here’s a bit of advice from her to sign off with – until next time, don’t let the grind get you down.

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Baking an ‘Extra Cake’

Some of the challenges on the list are easier than others. Some take weeks or even months of preparation, testing our capacities to commit to and see something through to the end. The marathon forced us to push the boundaries of our respective mental and physical comfort zones.

Then there are those challenges that, no matter how well prepared for them we are, could well end up with an impromptu trip to the hospital. This was undoubtedly one of the latter.

Number 34 - ‘bake the world’s most extra cake’.

For those of you who aren’t up to date with the latest lingo the term ‘extra’ does not, as I had previously thought, mean something that is especially good. In fact, the urban definition of ‘extra’ refers to anything that is overly excessive.

I love baking and at any given time will have a full array of flavourings, decorations and colours in my designated ‘baking cupboard’. So although the original plan was to bake a really good cake, we naturally decided to bake an overly excessive one instead. How? By baking every single ingredient in my cupboard into one enormous, terrifying frankencake of course.

Given my complete lack of organisation, when Kyli arrived to assist with the making of said cake, we had absolutely no idea what would be going into it. I had considered looking through the cupboard beforehand, but half the fun was seeing what would be going into the mixture together.

We decided to set out a couple of ground rules before starting. First of all we decided that no matter how unappetizing the combination, if it was in the cupboard it went into the cake provided it was a) consumable and b) reasonably within date (i.e. hadn’t grown legs and personality).

Secondly we decided that being as how several of the items were in multiples, that we only needed to one of each of them. For example, I have several shades of red food dye – for occasions when just the one shade of red won’t do – but we only used one.

With the non-consumable items removed, we were left with what was actually going to be put into the mixture. Aside from the normal items such as eggs, flour and sugar, we were both excited and horrified to discover we would in fact be making a coconut, caramel, strawberry, orange, vanilla, prosecco cake.

After much careful planning (about 2 minutes of chatting) we decided to use the ‘make the batter, seperate it into containers, colour and flavour each one and then sort of splat it into the pan’ method. What we ended up with was several bowls of radioactive looking mixture ready to go into the oven. For clarity, we had red strawberry flavoured mix, yellow prosecco flavoured mix, orange flavoured mix that was incidentally also orange, blue coconut mixture and green caramel mixture. The vanilla we used went into the butter-cream filling.

Going into the oven our creation resembled something halfway between a cake and a Muppet that someone had melted down and poured into a bowl.  It did however still smell like cake.

We sat and made plans for a few more fort activities whilst it was baking and I did the obligatory peek into the oven after about half an hour to see what was going on.

Now I do a lot of baking and have a pretty good knowledge of how my oven works. Usually at this stage of the process the cake is rising nicely, emitting both a pleasant heat and the delicious aroma of freshly made tasty treats.

This time I opened the oven door and was greeted by a blast of inferno-like hot air that could very well have come from the seventh circle of hell.

Eyeballs melting, my nostrils are met by something that smells a lot like what I imagine a burning carcass would smell like. Unfortunately Kylie wasn’t looking and so I had to do it a second time so that we could get a picture of me choking on the fumes. Here’s the picture. It’s delightful.

Once out of the oven and cooling, the cake actually smelt half decent once more, leading me to believe that it might in fact have been my oven that was the problem.

The next issue was that there were a few burnt patches on the outer layer that ruined the overall aesthetic we were going for. Obviously, the clear answer was that one of us needed to shave the cake. I was rewarded for my efforts with a slightly wonky dome shaped construction that looked like a confused hippy had vomited onto it.

We had used a lot of the colours we had in the batter, but still had a few that needed to put in their cameo appearances. With that in mind we decided to go for much the same approach to decorating as we did to mixing in that we just sort of made all the colours, lumped them on the top and hoped for the best.

That done, we also added gold food paint, silver, gold and pink glitter, crunchy strawberry pieces, golden shimmer bits, mini Jazzies, white chocolate and mixed decorative stars. Kylie did attempt to artfully throw stars across the top of the cake; however most of them missed and landed half way across the kitchen. Our wonderful monstrosity complete, we tucked it into the fridge to marinade in its own juices for a while until the icing had somewhat set.

Inevitably the moment finally came that we had been simultaneously dreading and anticipating – the actual tasting of the cake. Not sure what exactly to expect we videoed our taste test, the video from which will be posted on our Face book page along with the other pictures. I can’t speak for Kyli, but personally I was hoping for a Charlie & The Chocolate Factory-esque experience wherein each bite would be layered with a different flavour. Forks held aloft and the local ambulance service on speed dial, we finally got to see what an orange-coconut-caramel-strawberry-vanilla-prosecco cake tasted like.

The answer was – surprisingly pleasant.

Admittedly, the flavours we used were fairly standard flavours for a cake. It wasn’t as though we’d added a few tablespoons of gravy granules and a dollop or two of Heinz Salad cream into the bowl. I’m not sure if I was hoping for something disgusting or simply anticipating it based on my previous experiences of trying new things.

What we actually got was a reasonably light, somewhat overly sweet sponge. Kylie could taste more of the caramel; I could taste more of the strawberry. It was really quite edible despite looking like someone had carted it out of Chernobyl in a wheelbarrow.

Now I know it’s cheesy to try and crowbar meaning into any of the ridiculous things that we do but I would be lying if I said that making our ‘extra’ cake didn’t get me thinking. It seems like a good metaphor for life, or more accurately, the benefits of trying something new and crazy.

Would we have cared if it had tasted terrible? No, it would have been hilarious.

Sometimes you have to put everything you have into something just to see what happens. Our cake could have been a disaster and it could have been a triumph. Until you try something new, you’ll never know what you might create.

So would we recommend baking a cake using absolutely every ingredient in your baking cupboard?

Absolutely. Just don’t blame us if it tastes like absolute garbage.

Which it might.

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Why You Should Stress Out Your Children

If you have children under the age of twelve, and you live in the UK, the chances are that recently you’ve found at least one of your kid’s teachers curled up in a ball, rocking gently back and forth as tears roll down their chalk-dusted face and they waffle indecipherably about ‘SATs’ and ‘Ofsted’.

If you don’t live in the UK (or you live in a cave and have never heard of ‘SATs’), they are a set of examinations that children sit at various stages in their academic career to determine a) what maths group they’ll be in for the next three years and b) just how much of a shit parent you are.

The first thing you must know about the SATs is, that despite the fact that nobody on earth has ever asked anyone how they did in their Key Stage Two English exam at a job interview, the only thing more horrendous than teaching the SATs (I’m guessing, I’m not a teacher but it seems stressful) is hearing about the SATs.

This is because all people (when I say people, I mean mothers – we’re a specific subgenre that come with built in PMS and bits of Jaffa cake wedged into our handbags until our spawn reach their teens, at which point we retain the PMS but lose the Jaffa cakes.) fall into two categories.

In the blue corner you’ve got those that fall into the ‘high stress’ category. You’ve seen them, stalking teachers on the playground at home time like a lioness stalks an elderly wildebeest, buying up all the revision guides in WH Smiths and screaming the times tables on the walk to school like a demented drill sergeant.

Then you’ve got the red corner, where we should all be very quiet so as not to spook anyone. This is where you find those that believe the trauma of sitting the SATs will forever, irrevocably damage their cherished little ones. Also, they would all like hugs.

Now, I’m a whole hearted believer in stressing your children out. As someone who is genetically predisposed to panic over everything, I cannot emphasise enough the importance of stress early on in life because, and this is the vital part... life does not teach you how to handle it by yourself.

It gives it to you in abundance, but never once thinks to offer you the instruction manual.

And, whilst I’m not advocating yelling ‘you’ll never amount to anything!’ in your four year olds biscuit covered face, preparing your children for the realities of life is a responsibility.

Rather than subjecting your children to years of coddling, only to see them flounder as they reach maturity and realise you don’t get gold stars just for trying, why not proactively teach them to become stronger, well rounded individuals who recognise both their mistakes and successes?

The education system’s most spectacular failing (aside from the lack of funding, resources and governmental support) is that it is horrendously outdated and not applicable, for the most part, to modern life. Academic subjects, while still important, are now far less applicable than skills such as citizenship, economics, finance, coding, STEM, mechanics and engineering yet most average schools offer our children minimal exposure to these environments or topics.

I’m in my mid thirties and I still don’t understand pensions or interest rates. My life and credit rating might be immeasurably better had anyone ever taken the time to teach me how to be an adult. If anything, that in itself ought to be on the syllabus – Key Stage Four in Advanced Adulting.

It is no good waiting until children go to secondary school to start introducing stress into their lives. You cannot expect them to coast through the first twelve years, expecting some sort of participatory award for getting out of bed in the morning only to be thrust into a world of high expectation.

‘But tell me, you heartless monster, how do I stress out my children without ruining them forever?’ I hear them cry from the red corner. “They are delicate little angels.”

I’m not saying that we should all subject our children to The Hunger Games. I’m saying that a healthy dose of reality, coupled with supportive guidance and education as to how to react to and deal with a stressful situation, is a far better tool to equip your children with than avoidance techniques.

We teach our children how behave right (mostly), we teach our children how to eat right and we teach our children how to write right (pun intended). So why are we afraid to teach our children how to stress right? Yes, that is a thing. Those in the know might refer to it as ‘grounding’ – the techniques employed when stress is inevitable, but ultimately, something that can be managed. There are no grounding techniques that suggest running in the other direction or putting a paper bag over your head. By removing stress from our children’s lives, we are effectively doing just that to them. We are teaching them that stress is something powerful, something to fear.

Now it is easy to sit and write opinions without coming up with any real, valid suggestions as to how one might go about introducing stress into your children’s lives without being an absolute arsehole about it. I’m not trying to make toddlers cry here. So here are a few ideas.

Once per month, it should be mandatory that all primary and junior school age children should forgo academic subjects for the day in order to attend cadets. Now, let’s be clear on this one, I’m a liberal, a pacifist and something of a freewheeling hippy. I’m not suggesting that they bring back national service or that we should give rifles to pre-adolescents. They would however learn problem solving, team work, a host of practical skills and gain the ability to properly traverse a scramble net.

They should also introduce a ‘hardship day’ – yep, you read that right. All schools should have a day where everyone has to give up their chairs and sit on the floor. All computers, electronic screens and projectors are removed or covered up. If you want to be really evil you can turn the heating off, although expect a tidal wave of angry mothers breaking down the doors. Every child has the same lunch, the same drink and walks around in their socks.

Then, ask them what they can do to help themselves. I would put money on them being a shit ton more resourceful than we’d ever give them credit for.

Invite guests to your school (carefully selected, vetted guests obviously) and expose children to people who might stress them out. Invite the residents of the local old people’s home to lunch and watch as a six year old tries to work out why there’s a pair of false teeth in the water jug and some old dude keeps screaming ‘they’re coming for me!’ every five seconds. They can deal with it. Trust me.

Children need to understand that whilst the world might not always give them what they want, they are able to deal with the sorts of things it may eventually give them – hard times, challenges, obstacles and a geriatric father who walks around M&S with his pants around his ankles.

Life is shit sometimes. Things go wrong. Sometimes we work hard for things that we never get. Sometimes we worry about things. But we still survive. We still laugh, we still find joy in things and we still struggle to find matching socks first thing in the morning. The world is incredibly stressful, but it is also incredibly exciting. If you only prepare your children for one half of it, you’re doing them a disservice.

Teach your children what the world is really about, and for the love of (insert Deity here), teach them that nobody and I mean nobody, gives a fuck about the SATs.

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No 106. Run a Marathon

I’m pretty confident that if anyone had told us a few years ago that we’d be either willing or able to run a marathon we would have laughed heartily in their faces.This was before the blog or the concept of the fort life existed. It was before we had any real concept of what we could and could not actually achieve.

Since we started crossing things off the list a little under a year ago, we’ve crossed off eleven challenges in a definitive way, along with a few others in a kind of sort-of-but-not-really way. Not a bad record considering we’re doing this with highly conflicting schedules, families and lives of our own to lead and a very limiting budget of absolutely nothing.

This was, however, by far the most physically and mentally challenging task we’d taken on so far.

This was the Asics Manchester Marathon 2019 and this is how it all went down.

Neither of us is an athletic superstar. Although Kylie has had a moderate interest in health and fitness, my introduction to the world of sports came relatively recently. It all started with a couch to 5k training programme that I was coerced into by a colleague, who later came to be my running guru.

Up until the 7th April 2019, the furthest I had run in an actual race was a half marathon completed three years ago. Kylie had even less of a track (pun intended) record, having clocked up a 10k and a few muddy/obstacle races. So it was always going to be a challenge.

We woke up to a mild Manchester morning, slightly earlier than my alarm was set for, and took a few minutes to bask in the luxury of our three stars Aldi-adjacent hotel room. Having arrived two hours later than anticipated the night previously (thanks to the Grand National) we hadn’t had much of a chance to relax.

I found I was pretty calm at that point. All of my nerves about the event centred on actually getting to the right place on time and not missing the start. It wouldn’t be out of character for me to have gotten the date wrong and turned up the day before/after the event by mistake.

I encounter my first obstacle of the day before we’ve even left the room. Pre-race breakfast, you shall forever be my nemesis. I’ve read all the advice, seen all the nutritional plans and despite my efforts, there is still not a single recommended breakfast that I can stomach without wanting to vomit. Whilst Kylie has the natural predisposition to have a high tolerance for healthy foods, I hate nuts, pulses and any of the other slow energy release foods that they recommend. The smell of peanut butter and banana makes my stomach churn. I immediately want bacon. And crisps.

Not wanting to collapse halfway through the race, I do bravely attempt to munch my way through a pot of instant porridge. It is horrendous. I manage about a third followed up by a healthy chunk of malt loaf which I figure is better than nothing. I also put a raw fruit and nut bar in with the rest of our gear to take with us, hoping that it can be my Hail Mary. I am very aware however that the chances are I probably haven’t filled the tank up quite enough.

We arrive at the starting area and there are a decent number of people already there. It is comforting to see people of all ages, shapes, and sizes arriving. Our chosen charity, Cancer Research UK, seems to have one of the best turnouts. I counted at least twenty people sporting the same vest as we were wearing before the race even started. Proof, not that it was needed, at the number of people affected by the horrendous battle that sufferers face. Like us, we suspect a lot of them are people forced to watch from the sidelines as their loved ones face a much bigger challenge than a mere 26.2 miles.

After a long wait to queue for the already overflowing toilets, we make our way towards the start line, take the obligatory selfie and look for the pacers. If you haven’t run a marathon before, the pacers are runners who carry a flag to show the estimated finish time for the race if you are able to match their speed for the duration.

Because of our troubles during training, I am taking an optimistic guess that we’re going to be finishing somewhere around the five and a half hours mark. Pushing through the crowds, we go past the sub-four hour pacer, then the sub-four and a half hours, and then...we run out of pacers.

I know that they’re meant to be around somewhere but we’re already at the back of the queue and we’re only around the 4:45 mark. I figure if we linger at the back, as close to the five-hour mark as possible we should be OK. It isn’t until about twenty-five minutes later when we approach the start line that I turn round and realise that since taking our position about a thousand other people have appeared behind us. Apparently, we were over eager.

Having arrived at just after 8am, we finally cross the start line at just before 09:30 and by 09:32 there’s a line of male racers against the side of the road peeing into bushes. I guess that’s one way to beat the toilet queues. 

Despite my reservations about being in a higher pace group than I had planned, we find we settle into a rhythm pretty quickly. The first three miles seem to fly past. There is a good atmosphere although at this point not much in the way of interaction between the runners. People just want to get into the zone before they start paying attention to anything else.

The route is well marked and easy to follow – I’ve run in races before where you can hardly tell where you’re meant to be going and it doesn’t help with your mental focus.

Kyli has one of her earbuds in so she can listen to music. I have mine with me but decide against bothering for the time being. There are a lot of people playing music and the crowds have a good vibe so for me, that was enough to get me up to the seven or eight-mile mark.

As we reach eight miles I am feeling surprisingly optimistic. Although I run a lot, I tend to combine long distance with power walking and it is unusual for me to get to eight miles without at least a brief pause to walk a little. I find myself thinking that perhaps five and a half hours is achievable. Let’s just say we were still in the honeymoon period of the race at this point.

Approaching the halfway point we’re still making good time. We’ve definitely slowed down and walked a little but the first ten miles at least felt like they’d definitely gone our way.

My first half marathon three years ago took me three and a half hours. We got to the mile 13 marker at two hours forty-seven, which I was pretty happy with. We took the obligatory selfie.

It is at this point that it starts to go downhill for me. I’m a little hungry which isn’t helping, but the main issue is that my legs are showing signs of the same issues I usually get at around mile twenty. They’re unusually heavy and my stride is getting shorter by the minute. We decide to slow down for a mile or two to see if I can stretch it out or walk it off.

My intention is to walk to mile marker seventeen as an absolute maximum. By the time we get to seventeen, my legs are not holding up well. I keep apologising profusely to Kylie because I feel like I’m holding her back. She tells me it is fine, but mentally and emotionally this hits me like a ton of bricks.

Not to mention I’m also pretty pissed off because I did a lot more training and out of the two of us, I’m the runner with more experience. Not that it was Kylie’s fault – the race goes the way the race goes. I wouldn’t say I felt like giving up, but I certainly wasn’t happy. They say that the hardest part of running a race is getting past your own thoughts, and this is certainly true. We were less than two-thirds of the way around and I was already feeling defeat creeping up. The further we get around the course, the more it becomes apparent that my legs are just not going to cooperate with me. They don’t hurt, but by now they’re impossibly heavy and I can’t steer them in the right direction. It doesn’t matter how much I try I can’t lift my feet off the floor enough to get a good stride. Each time we run, I end up shuffling more than anything. I can manage bursts of about 30 seconds or so but we actually find that I can power walk much faster than I can run.

This in itself poses a bit of a problem. My natural walking pace is unnaturally fast. Whilst Kylie is outpacing me significantly on the running, I find myself power walking ahead. In the end, we come to the conclusion that finishing slowly is better than not finishing at all – and we’re in this together, so together we’ll stay.

Finally, we get into the home straight, the last few miles. I was fully prepared for the fact that just over twenty-six miles is a much longer distance than you think. Until you’re actually doing it, you have no idea and I mean NO IDEA. The last few miles are a nightmare.

Fortunately, at this point we’ve become surrounded by people who are in a similar state and like us, are just focused on getting to the end. We spend most of the second half of the race either slightly ahead or slightly behind a man dressed as Mrs. Potato Head. Seeing the crowd reaction to him is heartening, especially given that we’re running for the same cause. I’m also grateful to the residents of Manchester for supplying a copious amount of Haribo and jelly babies. I’m really hungry at this point. I’ve had three carb gels which aren’t even touching the sides. I’m dreaming of baguettes and the other runners are starting to look like giant cheeseburgers with legs.

Finally, the finish line hones into view. We have less than a kilometre to go. I had expected that I would feel emotional crossing the finish line, however to my surprise, I got more choked up just seeing it on the big screen. I won’t lie, there’s a lump in my throat, tears in my eyes and copious blisters on my feet. I feel like I might need to dispose of my trainers in some sort of industrial waste receptacle.

We discuss the idea of running the rest of the way however Kylie points out that distance is deceptive. It turns out she is right. It is a lot further away than it looks and I doubt I could have made it had we made a run for it.

As we get closer I spot our families waiting for us. More accurately, I spot my six foot six brother in law and a small blonde dot that I can only assume is my littlest niece. As we get closer, I see everyone waiting for us and it does give me a little boost. I’m determined that they’ll see us run across the finish line rather than crawl.

I have literally nothing in the tank. The only thing that pushes us over that finish line is combined mental determination and belligerence. We did manage to run over, giving us a respectable first ever marathon time of just over six hours. In my mind, I’d imagined coming over the finish line like a conquering champion, running into the arms of my other half and punching the air in victory. I thought there might be tears. There weren’t any – I don’t think there was enough water left in my body to actually produce any.

In a brief window of probably less than five seconds, I feel an overwhelming sense of achievement. Kylie and I share an awkward, sweaty hug and make our way through the throngs to collect our medals, t-shirts and to rip the arms off of the poor girls handing out snack-sized malt loaf packs to the runners. I’m ecstatic to see my husband and son but any thoughts of hugs and congratulations soon go out of the window when I see the carrier bag of snacks my brother in law has provided. My main priority is filling my face with as much food as I can as quickly as possible.

We did say several times whilst on the course that we would never want to do another marathon ever again. I’m pretty sure that for Kylie that still holds true. For me, however, despite the pain and the problems, not even ten minutes after finishing I was pretty sure that I wanted to do it again. I’ve already started looking into marathons for 2020. Whether I’ll do the same one again or a different one remains to be seen.

Since we finished the race, we’ve had a little extra influx of donations to bring our total to over the £500 mark. Combined with the money that I raised for Sweatember and the total Kylie raised for her UWC boxing match, we’re close to raising £1000 for Cancer Research in eleven months and that’s nothing to be sniffed at.

People might ask why after I’ve checked number 106 off the list I would want to do it again?

The answer is simple.

After all the preparation, the planning, the things that went right and the things that went wrong, after all the heavy leg induced troubles and the hunger, I got to experience those brief five seconds of feeling like there’s nothing I can’t do as I cross the finish line.

Those five seconds are everything to me.

They’re five seconds when I’m not the girl who worries about being too fat or too wobbly. I’m not the girl who was always picked last for PE at school. I’m not the girl who always gave up before the end because things got tough. I’m the girl that just crossed the finish line.

I am exactly who I’ve chosen to be. I’ve done what I never thought I could. I like being that person.

[thedaywebuiltthefort-blog]

Welcome to DnD

After something of a manic few weeks, I’ve finally had time to sit down and update the blog. What with marathon training, working on the novel, going to my actual job and playing with pygmy hedgehogs I’ve found myself unintentionally putting the blog on hold.

That isn’t to say that during that time I haven’t been ticking a few things off the list. Because I very much have. But I’m not here to write about that today, no.

Today I am here to write about a challenge that would defy everything I have come to know about my physical, mental and spiritual limitations and teach me that anything can, and will happen.

Or at least it would have, had my character not fallen asleep.

I’m talking about my very first foray into the dark and mysterious world of Dungeons and Dragons.

Now, if you don’t already know what D&D is, I would suggest looking up Critical Role. Whilst there is an absolute trove of D&D sites, books and blogs to get you up to speed, for anyone that has come to the game recently, there is a good chance that it’s all thanks to the online show.

As a writer and lifelong fantasy fan, I have always been vaguely aware of how D&D works. I’ve helped draw up character sheets, I’ve watched videos and I know that at some point there was a largely disappointing movie made based on the game. However, I’d never actually played it, until now.

Thanks to a borderline obsession with Critical Role, my husband recently started playing D&D and had tried a few different online groups. Having sat and watched him play a few times, I thought perhaps it might be time to give it a try on a one-off, non-committal basis.

After a quick chat with the DM (Dungeon Master) of his most recent group, it was agreed that I could join their current quest as a six foot tall, bald female half-elf character named Ude.

The first thing we did was run through the different aspects of the character and what she could do. My other half got me to pick out my choices for spells, cantrips, and physical attributes. Now, this I could deal with, and I’m told that I made fairly decent choices.

I did find, however, that as my other half was happily explaining in lengthy detail what each of the different choices meant, my eyes were glazing over and my brain found itself pondering whether or not birds technically have armpits, which is the sort of question my brain often asks.

I discovered very quickly that when it comes to D&D, whilst anything can and will happen during the game, before that there are an awful lot of things you need to know. Most of which I found very confusing. It eventually ended up with me saying things like ‘yeah but that one’s got a fireball, I want that one.’

With Ude’s character sheet finalised, we sent it off to DM for a quick check through. Following this and prior to the game, my husband arranged for me to have a quick chat with the DM to run through some of the finer points of the character and what we would be doing.

Unfortunately, I was under the impression that the DM wanted to speak to me.

The DM was under the impression that I wanted to speak to him.

It made for a somewhat stilted conversation as I desperately tried to think up questions and not look as unprepared as I was, whilst my other half stood in the background looking confused and whispering ‘go on then, talk...’

Fortunately, the DM turned out to be a pretty chilled out person and he managed to talk me through some of my expectations, answered my off the cuff questions and generally made me feel like a lot less of an idiot than I felt.

Several days later it was game day. I spent a few hours rearranging the kitchen, setting up various props and lighting (much to my husband’s amusement/annoyance) so that I could film the session both for reference and so I could use a few video snippets on the blog.

Despite his reservations about both my skills in cinematography and furniture moving, my husband did dutifully create me a camera holder for my phone using the best cardboard box and masking tape that money can buy.*

*This later turned out to be pointless as the video wasn’t even of good enough quality to edit, much less bother publishing. I will state just for the record that the kitchen however remains rearranged because it looks better now.

As is normal with any social event (albeit online), about an hour before we start I’m hit with a wave of nerves which only seem to increase as we get set up.

I’m nervous about meeting new people in any capacity. This is largely based on previous experience and my natural talent for looking and sounding like a bit of a weirdo around strangers.

I remedy this with the liberal application of wine from the shop over the road.

Just before we get started, I have a quick chat with the DM.

As I’m joining part way through the campaign there are a few things I need to know about the setting, where the party is heading and what they do and don’t know at this point.

He tells me a few things and all of a sudden it all feels a little bit espionage-esque, like my laptop will self destruct thirty seconds after receiving all of the pertinent information.

I’m not entirely sure how much, if anything, of what I’m told I am meant to reveal however it doesn’t matter as I instantly forget everything I’ve just been told.

The game starts and I spend the first few minutes just trying to get a grasp of the other characters and what they’re doing. As my character is a guest on this session I don’t actually get introduced until a little while in.

At this early point, I encounter my first hurdle. I can recognise the DM’s voice and I can pick out the only other female in the group, but other than that I have no idea who is talking when. This makes it hard for me to track which characters are where. We also had several problems with internet connection and lost the sound feed a couple of times. This meant that there were a few occasions where I missed large chunks of the conversation.

So before my character even gets to put in an appearance, I’m sweating with nerves and completely lost, almost to the point of thinking it would be better if I just bowed out gracefully with my dignity in tact.

The thing about D&D - and especially the worlds that it creates - is that this is not just a board game that you whip out and play off the cuff.

This is hours of planning, creation and prep work for the DM.

People get emotionally invested in the story and their characters. I don’t want to be the idiot that comes in and accidentally kills everyone by launching an inadvertent fireball at them.

Eventually, my character is introduced. I summon up all of my courage and prepare to reel off the detailed description of Ude and her personality that I have spent the past few weeks preparing.

But I don’t.

Instead, my character sidles up to the only other female character and stands there, looking awkward and generally being closer than it is necessary to be to someone you’ve just met. So pretty much mirroring my normal reaction to this situation in the real world.

Now I’m going, to be honest – I don’t remember a whole lot of what was going on at this point. I wanted to be as engaged in the campaign as possible but really I was just having trouble keeping up.

I also wasn’t sure what I could and couldn’t do, despite my husband’s constant reassurances that my character can pretty much attempt to do anything (although any actions will have varying degrees of success).

I think at one point I actually said ‘Ude is going to suggest that she might possibly have something to say’ before waiting for permission to say what it was she wanted to say and still not being one hundred percent confident I should have said anything at all.

I knew the party was required to fetch a black orchid from the jungle, for reasons that have since escaped me, and saw this as my first opportunity to utilize one of my amazing character attributes.

I offered to turn into a dire wolf so that I could run really fast and go fetch it.

The plan didn’t actually work out, so sadly for me, I didn’t get to show off my wolfy prowess, but I was duly told by my husband that this had been a good suggestion.

Lack of wolfiness aside, the party set out to find the black orchid having spent the earlier part of the game flicking between sourcing information from the bird people (https://www.dndbeyond.com/races/aarakocra) who resided in the mountain village we had just visited, and making humorous digs at the bard (who seemed to inexplicably have a lot of musical instruments).

Just as I start to feel like I’m starting to hit my stride and get into it, the party is attacked by a tiger hybrid. As the other members of the party start to take their turns, I revel in the fact that finally, my character can do something cool and awesome!

I will save the day and everyone will love me! I mean Ude!

My turn rolls (no pun intended) around and having quickly refreshed myself on the various powers and spells I can use (tangling vines, woo yeah, firebolt, woo yeah, big magic stick, woo yeah) get ready to do a battle like a badass heroine.

Then my character falls asleep.

I’m not sure how or why, but once again D&D feels strangely relatable. Weeks spent worrying and stressing over a big event only to inevitably sleep through it all and miss it.

The group put in a good show and once Ude eventually wakes up she does get to use some of her healing powers to patch up a couple of players who fell afoul of a few well-aimed tiger beast strikes. Personally, I’m just happy that a) nobody has died and b) I didn’t accidentally kill them.

As we come to the end of the session, I actually find myself finally feeling a little more relaxed. I now have a sort of understanding who is playing who and which characters bring what to the group. There is a little bit of post-game chat which seems to mostly be the other members of the group reading out the list of tasks I have to complete from the blog with a mixture of amusement and confusion.

Despite their reservations at some of the tasks (in particular the ones that my niece came up with), they’re a group of funny, engaging and welcoming people.

There are not many places you can go where people are genuinely intrigued by the idea of farting in public as a challenge. Apparently, that isn’t the case in the world of Dungeons and Dragons.

I’d like to have been able to give a more detailed account of the gameplay itself and what happened; unfortunately, the truth is I still haven’t quite worked out about eighty percent of it.

The only way I’m going to remedy that is by trying again, which I intend to do.

D&D isn’t just a game that you can pick up and play – there are worlds within worlds and a lot to learn. Did I have fun? Yes, I did. Do I think I was any good? Absolutely not, I was a whisper away from completely useless.

I guess Ude is just going to have to put in another appearance.

You know, for research purposes.

[thedaywebuiltthefort-blog]

Why I gave up full-time work to write, run and do silly things

There are many reasons that people choose not to work full time. It might be that they have children and need to be at home for part of the day. They might be fortunate enough not to need the money. If you have spent most of your life working a full time nine to five, the decision to cut back your working week to the bare minimum is for most, one borne out of practicality.

Almost a year ago exactly, I made the decision to quit full-time work.

Well, I say I made the decision – I actually got fired from my last full-time job. To say it was the worst job I ever had would be a gross understatement but still, on a scale of one to ten, it was probably around a four. It was a generic office management job, the sort I had been doing for well over a decade, but the atmosphere was terrible. I suspect that the reason I was fired was not that, as they stated ‘I didn’t really work for them’ but rather because my opinions didn’t work for them.

The job prior to that was worse. Again, it was your standard office management job but with one significant difference – I genuinely and truly loved what I was doing. I had a fantastic team, great rapport with my peers and looked forward to bounding into the office each morning.

Just before I had been there for two years, we were taken over by another company and our two offices merged. Having been through a similar process previously, I was not in any way fooled by the placating reassurances of our senior management team. The truth be told, I could see the writing on the wall as soon as we knew what was happening.

I’d put a lot of time, effort and personal development into those two years however so I was reluctant to just walk away from that. Against my better judgement, I decided to see how things would go. A few months later I realised I had made a terrible mistake.

It was clear immediately that my job was no longer viable. Rather than telling me that and working out an appropriate course of action, my new employer chose instead to take away all of our resources, downscale my team and, over a period of several months, demote me little by little.

They chipped away at my confidence and self-worth until there was nothing left. We had conversations about my ability to handle stress and whether leadership was really for me. This was after several months of being criticised, stared at and given impossible targets to meet using a system that was deliberately set up to fail.

I sank into a deep depression which got to the point where I had to seek medical help. I have always, for as long as it is safe and productive for me to do so, chosen to manage my mental health holistically. It was too much at this point, and I had to take some time off.

When I felt well enough to work again, I did go back for a little while although by that point I was already looking for a full-time job elsewhere. I got offered the aforementioned job I was eventually fired from and handed in my notice. During my meeting to discuss my leaving, my manager informed me that as ‘management’ I was obliged to provide them with 12 weeks’ notice.

I broke down on the desk and sobbed my heart out. She didn’t really get why, but the thought of giving another three months of my life to that job was unthinkable. I gave them four.

But I digress, to take me back to my original point, I’d been fired and I had no job to go to. I tried to find something similar, attending countless interviews and honing my CV to perfection. I got a few offers, some reasonable interest but there was something very wrong.

I had the unshakable feeling that somehow, I had been given a sign by the universe.

About a month after losing my job, I sat down at the kitchen table with my laptop and wrote out the first draft of chapter one of a fantasy adventure. Within a week, I had over 10,000 words saved into a folder in My Documents. It took me thirteen days, typing up to eighteen hours a day to complete my first novel in draft form. I lost weight, didn’t see the sun and almost forgot that the rest of the world existed. I lived almost exclusively on Red Bull and toast (not recommended).

My poor, attention starved husband got barely more than three words out of me in a fortnight. I was so far down the rabbit hole that an earthquake couldn’t have shaken me out of it.

That was it for me, from that moment on; as far as I was concerned I was first and foremost, before anything else a writer. I’d been told several times over the years that it was something I ought to pursue but before that, I had never taken the idea seriously. I had been writing things for years but had never thought of it as (quote unquote) a proper job.*

*disclaimer – sorry #writingcommunity, I now fully understand that writing IS a proper job. It is also an awesome job, a privilege and exhausting to boot.

Of course, writing takes a lot out of a person, but what it takes the most of, is time. I admire and salute those who can hold down a full-time job, family and find time to write. I have no idea how they can do it. For me, it was clear that there was a decision to be made.

There was a video posted online that went viral a few years ago where the actor Jim Carrey made an impassioned speech about his father not pursuing his dreams and later regretting them. The words that he used struck a chord with me – you can fail at what you hate, so why not take a chance on doing what you love?

It occurred to me that I had been doing exactly that. My nine to five career has been stalled, derailed, imploded, thrown me up, down, back and forth and has never once given me a single day of fulfilment or self-worth. So, with the backing of my husband and despite my complete lack of practical reasons for doing so, I decided I wouldn’t do it anymore.

I would take a chance on failing at what I loved.

Twelve months later and I’ve had three short pieces published on small platforms, I have two unpublished novels and I write semi-regularly for a blog where I do silly things for no apparent reason and then share them with our readership (which is anywhere between one and twelve people). The total sum of my earnings from writing so far is £13.

I’ve made about as much impact on the writing world as a bug on a windshield.

Yet I have no regrets.

Admittedly I do have a part-time job – I work flexible hours to enable me to pay the mortgage and to keep the electricity running long enough for me to spend several hours a day typing. I’m a great deal poorer than I used to be.

I didn’t give up working full time because circumstances forced my hand. I did it because after looking back on my life so far and weighing up the consequences of my actions, I realised that I was willing to take a chance on myself. I might not ever be successful, but I’m also not sorry and I never will be.

[thedaywebuiltthefort-blog]

Confidence

I am having a crisis of confidence.

It’s been going on for near enough thirty-four years now so I’m hoping that eventually, it’s just going to go away of its own accord. I have tried to shake it; unfortunately, nothing I’ve done appears to work. At this point, I’ve pretty much adapted to it.

I’ve always suffered from confidence problems. This might come as a bit of a shock to people who have met me. On the outside, I do come across as a reasonably self-assured person. On the inside, it’s a very different story.

You see, there are two different versions of myself.

There’s the version of myself that exists inside my head – the version that’s effortlessly talented, interesting and always has something witty to say. That version of me looks great in spandex. That version of me would know exactly what to do in a crisis.

But then there’s the version of me that I see in photographs, videos and when I look in the mirror. That version of me feels like – at best- a marginally adequate bag of flesh flailing and snorting through life. That version of me looks like a potato in spandex. It tells inappropriate anecdotes at formal gatherings and always fails to deliver the punch line.

Part of me believes that my lack of self-confidence stems from childhood bullying. I don’t want to make it a sob story and I don’t want anyone hearing tiny violins playing. It happened, it was rough but it’s just a part of the rich fabric of life. That, however, doesn’t take away from the fact that from a very young age, I had all of my failings laid bare. All of my insecurities used like tiny weapons of mass destruction.

A big part of it, however, is just my nature. I’m someone who needs validation from others. It isn’t very enlightened of me, but I’ve never pretended to be an enlightened person. I’m working on it.

Anyway, ever since I went to college (many years ago now) I decided that regardless of my insecurities, I would always attempt to push myself out of my comfort zone. Let’s face it, that’s where the best things tend to happen. I’ve been talking for a while with an old friend about working together on some creative projects. We’ve been back and forth, making and cancelling plans for a long time. Last night we actually managed to meet up to go over plans for a sketch video that he’s got planned.

Right up until about an hour before we arrived, I was still trying to think up a valid excuse as to why I couldn’t make it. Not because I don’t want to be a part of the project, but because my anxiety tells me that I’m probably going to ruin it. First off, it requires me to act and I am quite honestly the worst actor on the face of the planet. That isn’t me being insecure. There are some things you can see about yourself that aren’t about self-pity; they’re just cold hard facts.

Secondly, it meant walking into a room with a group of people that I either didn’t know or hadn’t seen for years and letting them see my general awfulness. I did have a couple of glasses of wine (which later proved to be an unwise move seeing as how I’m training for a marathon) and that did help. For the first few minutes, I was absolutely overcome with nerves, sitting in awkward silence with people who incidentally, were great, feeling like an absolute muppet.

We go through the script, chat a little and have what I think is quite a nice evening. The whole time though, all I can think is that I’m definitely not as interesting, talented or cool as these people. I’m sitting there feeling like a pretender. My poor husband went to sleep last night listening to me woefully lamenting how absolutely terrible I am.

The truth is that I’m probably always going to be my own worst critic. I’m always going to be plagued by these feelings that I’m not good enough. But the thing about confidence is that if you let a lack of it stop you from doing things, you’re going to miss out on what could be some of the best experiences of your life. Yes, you might try something and truly be terrible at it.

But if you convince yourself that it’s not worth doing something just in case you’re not instantly amazing at it, well, you’ll never know, will you? I’ve had many brilliant ideas over the course of my life that turned out to be absolute steaming turds. I’ve failed at more things than I can count. I’ve humiliated myself, injured myself, made terrible mistakes and guess what, I survived it all.

You can survive failure. You can get over the embarrassment. You can’t change something that you haven’t done. It’s all a matter of choice. You can let your insecurities stop you from doing things or you can accept the fact that you can try something and take the chance that it might not turn out the way you envisioned it. You have a comfort zone; zones have barriers which can be torn down. As Chris Martin so eloquently put it – if you never try, you’ll never know.

So yes, it is hard for me to walk into a room of absolute strangers and make conversation. I’m awkward and weird. It is hard for me to put myself out there and feel like all my flaws are on display. But I’ll do it anyway.

I don’t think there’s an Oscar in my future, and I don’t expect a call from Hollywood. That’s OK. If they still want me to be a part of the project, I’m one hundred percent on board. I’ll do as I always do, as I’ve done for years. I’ll tell my insecurities to pipe down and get over it. I’ll step outside of my comfort zone, try something new and be the best worst actor I can be.

[thedaywebuiltthefort-blog]

Marathon Training - update

As you may well have noticed from our social media posts, a few weeks ago Kyli and I started training for challenge number 115 on the list – Run a Marathon. Having spent the last few months trying to motivate myself to do anything (thanks to depression, Christmas and my miraculous rediscovery of alcohol) I have found it’s been a case of ‘easier said than done’.

As it stands, I am only about a week behind on my training schedule. Although I am pretty confident that I can technically complete a marathon, I’m not entirely sure I can complete it in less than six hours. I’ve decided not to set myself a target time for this one. As it is my first full marathon, my main goal is to simply complete it, whether that means running, walking or (as is more likely) crawling over the finish line.

What I don’t want however is to still be running the course while they take down the markers and start packing up for the night.  I’ve been managing to fit in pretty regular training sessions but so far haven’t been hitting the kind of distances I want to hit.

I know a lot of people who have run and continue to regularly run marathons. This seems to be the root of a lot of the motivational problems that I’ve been having.

A few years ago, I hadn’t as much as run for a bus in well over a decade. I always hated running. I never particularly liked any forms of exercise if I am perfectly honest. It was by sheer chance that I ended up working with someone (one of the previously mentioned marathon regulars) and was coerced into doing a ‘couch to 5k’ training programme.

I actually found that running a 5k was easier than I had thought. Apparently, my legs are capable of moving at something slightly faster than a slow ambling pace. After that, I moved on to a 10k and before long I had done a half marathon.

That was where it stopped. I did keep up running, sporadically, over the next couple of years although not with any real schedule. Quite often I’ll have breaks of a month or two where I don’t run at all. Put simply, I am not now nor have I ever been a natural athlete.

I do however surround myself with them and it makes me feel really crappy in comparison.

Whilst I will probably end up sweating, spitting and lurching over the finish line like a red-faced hermit that just crawled out of a bush, my friends and the like will sprint like elegant gazelles towards yet another personal best. They make running a marathon look easy.

That’s the problem with the way that we look at things a lot of the time. It makes you feel bad to think that no matter how hard you push yourself, how hard you try, there is always going to be someone out there that makes your effort look like you shouldn’t have even bothered getting out of bed.

They say that a lot of the obstacles that stand in your way come from you. In my case, I can concur that this is very much true. From the moment that I lace up my somewhat battered trainers, through every minute I’m out on the road or treadmill, there is a little voice inside my head that tells me I am going to unequivocally fail. I am going to fail at something that every other person in the world could do. *Disclaimer – I realise that not everybody in the world can run a marathon, my brain just likes to tell me these things and pretend that they are facts.

Recently I’ve taken to using route planners to draw out plans for where our training runs can take us. I don’t think until you do that you have any concept of just how far 26 odd miles is. I can tell you now that it is FAR. I’ve plotted routes to places that I wouldn’t even go to in a car on the basis that ‘it would take too long to get there’.

I’ve spent more time trying to think of plausible excuses for why I have to drop out, or why I can’t do this than I have actually spent preparing for it. It doesn’t help that Kyli and I haven’t had that much time to spend together recently so most of our training is being done alone.

It did occur to me today, however, that perhaps I am not as behind on my training as I think that I am. Yes, physically speaking I am not where I want to be...or even mentally or emotionally come to think of it. But this time five years ago I would never have even dreamt of entering a marathon. I wouldn’t have had the balls for it. I would have heard that voice in my head saying don’t bother and I would have listened to it. Perhaps training starts long before we actually think it does.

My mental state, my perspective and my knowledge of my body and my limits have changed so much over the past few years that there are parts of myself I don’t even recognise anymore. Tomorrow we’re aiming to get to 13 miles on our training run. If we can, great, if we can’t, then we try again.

A friend of mine put up a post on social media explaining how you could find a thousand reasons not to do something, but sometimes all you need is one single reason to do it, and that’s enough. I put up a response explaining in return how ‘one’ can be such a powerful number. When you hit the wall, as you will, there is always one more step you can take. You can always do one more minute, one more mile, one more shuffle onwards.

I asked myself what my ‘one’ reason for doing this was – as opposed to the hundreds I could list for not doing this – and I was surprised by the simplicity of my answer. True, my reason could be that we are doing this for charity and want to raise money. It could be because I want to prove something to myself, the people around me and anyone else watching. It could be because I secretly love having blisters on my feet and sweaty hair.

No, sorry. It’s actually pretty straightforward.

I’ve come too far not to.

I think as reasons go, it’s pretty hard to argue with that one.

If you want to follow our progress training for ASICS Manchester Marathon 2019 please keep checking back for updates and we will do our best to post as much as possible. You can also sponsor us by visiting –

https://fundraise.cancerresearchuk.org/team/team-tdwbtf-1

Thanks for your support

[thedaywebuiltthefort-blog]

The Day We Started Training

We’re only two days into the New Year and already I’m sick to the back teeth of having adverts and videos plastered all over my social media telling me how I need to get to the gym and lose all the weight I’ve put on over the festive season (9lbs in total if you need to know).

So I decided it was time to smash out a quick blog update whilst I polish off the last of the Lindor chocolate truffles and wedges of brie still lingering in the fridge.

Now I have not, nor will I, ever make a new year’s resolution.  They’re pointless, fruitless and thankless – in my view, it should be all about evolution and not resolution.

So with a spring in my step and a healthy dose of optimism (thank you Christmas holiday break away for vanquishing my depression demons for now) I am proud to announce that we are now in training for the ASICS Manchester Marathon 2019.

Between the two of us, Kyli and I did manage to pull off a few of the list challenges in 2018 and I don’t think we did too bad considering everything that was thrown at us behind the scenes. That being said, 2019 is the blank canvas we have been waiting for and it’s high time we kicked the list into overdrive. I’ve found a 16-week marathon training plan (which is handy as the marathon is 14 weeks away) however decided to start with Week 3 of the programme.  It’s been just over 2 weeks since my last gym session and about 8 weeks since my last road run.

I’m aware that Christmas has left me out of shape, but I figure I should be OK starting from Week 3 of the plan because the mileage on the first two weeks are way under the level that I would feel comfortable picking up.

This morning I went out on my first road run of 2019 – the target was 2 miles, so a nice easy one just to get me back into the swing of things. I had intended on going out first thing this morning however after sticking my head out of the front door at 7am, I decided that running alone on the ice, in the dark on the first day of training was not my best idea.

9AM rolls around and I’m kitted out and ready to go. I cannot emphasise enough that it was very cold. In my wisdom, I decided that the best approach would be to go for leggings, a t-shirt, and 3 sports bras, thus giving me ample cleavage support whilst leaving my arms exposed to the elements. I guess in my head I figured it would help build up resistance to the cold.

0.10 miles in and I am loving the world, I’ve got a nice rhythm going and I’m thinking to myself that I’ve got this in the bag – 0.20 miles in and I’ve started flaking already, all my hopes dashed and my fingers very much in danger of falling off.

It’s the cold that hits me first. I have to keep moving my fingers to stop them going numb which is distracting and painful. It’s a bold strategy – you have to keep moving or you’ll get hypothermia and die. Perhaps not one recommended by professionals.

Next, my brain starts in on me – it wants to know what the hell I think I’m doing flailing around town in my trainers when I could be at home eating cheese in my underwear.

By the time I get to 1.5 miles I’m really feeling like crap – there’s a pain in my ears and I realise suddenly that I have a headband on to stop my ears getting cold and I’ve not got them covered. Really I should have thought this through before I left the house.

I’ve been running for a few years now and I regularly used to suffer from a fluid build up on my left knee which makes it feel a bit like weight bearing on a sponge. This hasn’t happened for a good twelve months yet this morning and decided to come back with a vengeance.

So I get to 1.6 miles and I’m freezing my ass off, inappropriately dressed, simultaneously both bright red and turning a beautiful shade of crystal blue and limping around the estate. It’s at this point that I realise that what I’ve done today isn’t even 10% of what I’m going to have to do on April 7th.

Luckily, I’ll have Kyli with me on the day and hopefully, we’ll spur each other on with just the right amount of motivation and sarcasm. Until then, it’s an almost daily mix of running, yoga, weights and cross fit to get me at least semi-ready for what is one of the biggest and most challenging items on the list.

So has this terrible start put me off participating? Hell no.

I can’t wait to burn through this sucker and smash each and every wall that I hit along the way. We’ll give it a few weeks and then start fundraising again. Once more we’ll be raising money for Cancer Research and will be looking at a target of £750 minimum. Every penny and pound donated will be paid for in full in gritted teeth, early mornings, worn out trainers and a copious amount of rude words uttered every time we miss a target, fall down or have a bad training session.

There is no progress without the push. There is no gain without pain.

That’s what a lot of people who make New Year's resolutions tend to forget. They’ve got the plan, they’ve got the goal but they’re not willing to take the pain that comes with letting go of the old, embracing the new and bursting out of your comfort zone like a beautiful, albeit flabby and out of shape, butterfly.

Nothing comes for free. Nothing comes easily. You have to pay for what you want in sweat. It’s not easy, but if you forget about the resolutions and think about it in terms of evolution, you’ll find it a whole lot easier.

This is more than just a new day. It’s more than just a new year. This is a new you. Bring it on 2019, you best believe we’re coming for you.

[thedaywebuiltthefort-blog]

A little update

I realise that I haven’t written anything for this blog for a while, although I have made numerous attempts over the past few weeks. There have been several times that I’ve sat at the keyboard willing myself to make words happen, but knowing that nothing will come.

In my last post, I talked about feeling depressed again, and I had hoped that by now, the episode would have finished, the mood would have lifted and everything would be business as usual. Unfortunately, however, this has not been the case.

Instead, it’s spent the last several weeks well and truly kicking my ass. It hasn’t gone and it doesn’t look like it’s going to go anytime soon, so instead, I am just going to have to deal with it as best I can until it eventually starts to dissipate.

My reluctance to write anything for the blog has been made up of several factors – firstly, I am very aware that writing or reading about this subject can be a trigger and honestly I didn’t know if it was going to make me feel better or worse. Secondly, I am exhausted, all of the time. I don’t just mean a little bit tired. I am talking about all-consuming, complete and utter energy drain. There have been days when I have been lying in bed, willing my body to move, to get up, do anything and it just won’t happen. Lastly, I always knew that if I was going to write about depression that I would want to be brutally candid about my own experiences. The last thing I want to do is upset anyone or worry anyone.

In the end though, I am hoping that by writing about the symptoms, the experiences and the journey that I have been on, it might help somebody who is or has gone through the same thing to feel a little less alone.

There is no way to tell how or why depression will hit, but for me, I feel like there have been a lot of things that have contributed to this particular episode being a bad one. I’ll talk about that first, just to try and give the situation a little context.

When I look back over the year that has just been, it feels like a hurricane has ripped right through my life. I can’t remember many other times when so much has happened so soon and in such quick succession. I lost my job and was unemployed for months; we hit the financial skids and barely made it out with a roof still over our heads. There were family issues, troubles we needed to overcome together and what felt like endless days of waiting for news – good or bad. There was the day we made the list. Months spent charging from one thing to another, fundraising, fighting, running hundreds of miles and constantly, constantly feeling like we were facing a tidal wave of crap that just never stopped coming.

The strange thing was, throughout all of that, I had never felt so sure of myself, so energised and so ready to take on the world. The best way that I can explain that last twelve months is that it has been like being in a high-speed car chase, only the car is being chased by a tsunami...and whilst you’re driving you’re having to fight off an angry bear...and the bear has a hammer...and you’re being shot at by snipers and you’re trying to avoid all the potholes in the road.

Then suddenly, out of nowhere, the brakes slam on and you’re thrown out of the car. You land in the middle of a field, in the middle of nowhere and where once there was chaos and noise, now there is nothing.

There is nothing.

No noise, no bright lights, nothing.

And you’re alone.

I had spent so much of the last year in fight mode that I had no idea what to do when suddenly, everything seemed to stop. Now don’t get me wrong, I am glad to see the back of a lot of the problems we’d been dealing with, but (and in the spirit of honesty and transparency) I wish I had been better prepared for what would happen when the dust settled.

So that’s how this thing all started. It has been one of the most drastic changes in outlook, mood, and circumstance that I have experienced probably in the last decade. My body and my mind just haven’t known how to deal with that. The list, which had been one of the most important factors in getting me through the last twelve months, got shelved.

I started to feel like I had let myself down, that I had given up on something that I had committed to. One low day turned into another and another. All the little parts of my life that I had been successfully juggling started to drop away.

Truth told, physically, I think Sweatember left me in worse shape than I was prepared to admit. I loved doing it and honestly, will probably do it again but I think doing that may have drained the last little bit of gung-ho spirit from my now somewhat flabbier muscles.

If I really push myself, I can get to the gym twice a week at the moment for a very light 40-minute session. My regime has not so much gone out of the window as it has packed its bags, left a note on the kitchen table telling me what a disappointment I am and caught the bus to the next town.

Strangely, this time I don’t think my confidence has gone down as much as it would normally – or at least – not in all aspects. I certainly don’t like myself very much at the moment, but I do at least feel capable in certain situations. My confidence in my writing has gone, as the current lack of it proves. My confidence in my ability to run the 2019 Manchester marathon is non-existent.

What is worse this time, however, is the paranoia.

Oh yes, it’s time to dust off the old tinfoil hat and sit in the corner. I am full on, borderline conspiracy theorist paranoid. Little things that my husband or friends say take on whole new and deranged meanings. Ask me if I forgot to put the washing on before I go to work and you might as well be accusing me of murder.

Every little whisper, every laugh, every hushed conversation becomes, in my foggy brain, about me and how much you hate me, about something I’ve done wrong or not done. I know that this is just my mind vomiting up poison into my brain hole but it doesn’t matter. I can’t stop myself from feeling like that. It makes socialising a little awkward.

Which explains why I’ve been avoiding socialising wherever possible – the idea of a night out or going round to a friend’s house has become like facing a mountain that I’m really not prepared to climb right now.

Anyway, I feel like I could go on but I have neither the energy nor the inclination. I’ll try and write again soon and share more of the journey, at whatever point I may be, the next time I’m able to sit down and get something on paper (or screen as the case may be).

In other news, Kyli recently brought a ukulele so I am expecting that her next blog post may be cheerier than this one. I still need to learn to yodel so a duet is definitely on the cards in the future.

Lastly, I’d like to just point out something really obvious – it’s Christmas.

For a lot of people, this time of year is about fun, festivities, and frolics.

For others, it’s a really difficult time. There are some who, unlike me, aren’t able to talk about the things that they are going through. There are some who are much worse off and it’s important to understand that no matter what the time of year, it is as they say, OK not to be OK.

Just as long as you keep on fighting.

Don’t give up.

You’re not crazy, you’re not a failure and you are so very much not alone.

I might have taken a few knocks, I might feel like I’ve had my back against the ropes a few times but the important thing is that I haven’t and will not hit that floor. It doesn’t matter how much of an ass kicking that life or depression wants to give us. The gloves stay on. It’s not over. We keep on going and we don’t stop until that bell rings.

Success is never final, failure is never fatal, courage always counts – John Wooden

[thedaywebuiltthefort-blog]

No 109 - List Lightening Round

WARNING: The below post and accompanying videos may* contain swearing

*It does

Bold = Kyli.    Unbold(?) = Holly

In which the Listers make a nostalgic breakfast, do a ridiculous dance, Holly comes face to face with a foe more frightful than cows, they play a song, hi-jack a shopping trolley and Kyli points at a bus station and they masticate some poultry.

This one has been in the pipeline for a few weeks now. The world seems to have been hell-bent on throwing so many curveballs into the path that neither of us has been able to walk in a straight line for awhile. Time has been creeping past, every day life has just taken over. The idea came about after it had been a while since I had looked at doing anything on the list. Holly had done a couple of them in the run up to her birthday, even going off piste and coming up with a whole new challenge for herself  (have a look at her post about Sweatember) and I was feeling a bit left in the dust.

So I picked up the folder in which we stored all our original postits and flicked through to find something I could do that would be worth while and get me back in the game. Whilst looking through them it occurred to me that quite a few of them, whilst all important parts of the list, are actually quite small, easily done and wouldn't take up an awful lot of time or energy. This made me wonder how interesting a post we could really write about them if we were to do them individually. So I decided that we should find away to make it more challenging and more entertaining.

Ironically, my motivation has been running on empty recently and not being able to fall back on the list has been a challenge in itself. You see, that’s the dirty little secret about this whole thing, it’s more than just a silly blog where we do crazy nonsensical things. It actually takes a lot of hard work and energy to be this positive and upbeat all the damned time. There are a lot of days where lying face down on the floor eating biscuits seems like a much better option! But anyway, Kyli and I discussed the idea of completing a ‘lightening round’ of list challenges.

We agreed to give ourselves ONE day in which we try to tick off as many of the smaller things on the list as we can and collaboratively post about it!!

A few days ago we finally got the chance to get together and speed through some of the items that were easy to do with very little organizing. The nominations were;

No 17 - Ride in a shopping trolley

No 27 - Play ‘Fight Song’

No 58 - Do the ‘Poison’ dance

No 64 - Make drop scones

No 70 - Eat chicken on a bench

No 88 - Hold a snake

On Wednesday 13th October 2018 we successfully checked all of the above things off the list!! Woooooooo yeahhhhhhhh!!

We started the day by making drop scones (well Holly made them, I just ate them!). When we were kids our Nan used to make these as a quite regular treat so they were a big part of our childhood. I’m not sure anyone really knows what drop scones are actually meant to be. Apparently they’re supposed to be Scotch pancakes but having eaten those too, I can confirm they taste nothing alike. Unless we’re making them wrong, which is very possible.

Chances are high Nan was making them wrong too, she had a unique talent for burning things and drop scones were rarely an exception! Somehow though they were still so good!

Fuelled up and ready to go, we then completed the Poison dance in the kitchen, mentally and emotionally scarring my dog in the process. Just to clarify, the poison dance is a choreographed routine to Alice Cooper’s ‘Poison’ that we made up. I think a lot of people can relate to that experience of being a kid, making up dances in the house. I was about twenty when we made up this routine. I’d love to say it’s a step up from the dance we made up to the Spice Girls whilst dressed in bin bag dresses a few years prior, but I’d be lying! Say what you like about our lack of talent, rhythm or style - there is nothing not cool about making up dance routines. Unless you do them wearing bin bag dresses.

Dancing completed, it was time to move on to more serious things. We decided pretty early on that this was the day I was going to hold a snake. Let me be very clear, I have never once in my life touched a snake. They are one of two animals that I have an irrational phobia of, the other being cows.

I have a list of very real phobias as long as my arm – things that bite, things that move too fast, being in small spaces, flying, and on it goes. I have never had a bad experience with a snake, having never gotten close enough to one to get the chance. My fear is based purely on my certainty that all snakes are basically death tubes designed to kill you. I don’t even care if they’re non-venomous. They might be lying.

About five minutes from the local exotic zoo, my palms start sweating. Honestly, even I was a little surprised by my reaction. I genuinely thought that as with so many situations that I am uncomfortable with, I could just bullshit my way through it. I am the biggest coward on the planet. Bravado is my armour and I generally do a great job of joking my way through situations. It’s all about deflection.

The closer we get, the more I start to become convinced that something is going to go horribly wrong and this is all a terrible idea. I make a joke that perhaps all the snakes are out for the day. Secretly I’m hoping that might be true. Sadly, they were very much there. After falling victim to the judgmental stare of a teeny tiny owl I met a corn snake called Pumpkin.

Beware judgemental owls

I will point out now that giving something a cute name does NOT make it any less terrifying. You can call a shark ‘toothy jeff’ but it’s still going to rip your arm off.  Anyway, much to the amusement of the young man holding Pumpkin for the visitors, I have to do a few laps of the room before I can even look at her. We let him know straight away the reason we’re there and try to reassure him that I’m not just a crazy person. I am relieved to hear I am not the first person to go there for the very same reason. There is a very real chance I am going to projectile vomit all over this nice guy and Pumpkin. Every time she moves I am convinced she can smell my fear and is ready to launch herself like a haunted hose pipe towards my face.

After a few minutes, I actually manage to look at her and give her a slight prod with one finger. Pumpkin feels like the inner tube of a bicycle. It’s all just part of her plan to get me to let my guard down. Jokes on you Pumpkin, you can’t fool me. Again, it takes a few laps of the room before I’m able to touch her again. I hold her with help from the guy from the zoo who repeatedly reassures me that I’m not about to die in a snake-related accident.

The whole time my heart is pumping in my mouth. Eventually, I know that I need to hold her by myself or I can’t count this as a completed task. I hold her for about three seconds on my own, she moves slightly and I give her back. I do not enjoy any of it and am a little disappointed I don’t feel a great sense of accomplishment. Still, I did it and I can take something from that. I still hate snakes, Pumpkin included.  

However, nothing bad happened. Not every victory comes with a parade and a euphoric sense of self-satisfaction. Sometimes you just have to get through something you don’t really want to be involved with and come out the other side.  

After recovering from my snake holding, we head over to the local Asda to get a chicken to eat on a bench, possibly one of the stranger things on the list and one Kyli is better equipped to explain. I’ll go back to that one in a moment. Lastly, we went down to a local field where I had noted an abandoned shopping trolley a few days ago, in the hope that it would still be there. I’ve ridden in a shopping trolley before, but I still wanted to add it to the list. Now I’m not saying it’s big or clever to be in your early to mid-thirties (or late twenties… just getting that in there while I still can) and want to ride around in a shopping trolley, but nothing about the list is big or clever. The shopping trolley represents something to me. It’s not just a trolley. It’s a trolley full of missed opportunity.

For me, it’s all those times I walked past something stupid and silly because I was too afraid of what people might think. The fear that I might, shock horror, fall out and knock out all of my teeth and have to live the rest of my life as a toothless hermit eating soup. I tend to over think everything. As it turns out, I did fall out. I blame Kylie entirely. Muahahahahaha!

It did hurt. My teeth, fortunately, are all still where they are meant to be. It was pretty funny and not at all dignified. Anyway, as this is turning into quite a long post I feel like it would be appropriate to end it by going back to the whole chicken on a bench thing. As mentioned, Kyli is the best person to explain why eating chicken on a bench made the list.

No, it’s not an innuendo or a weird euphemism for something else, it is exactly what it says on the tin. Eat a chicken whilst sitting on a bench. The inaugural eating of a chicken whilst in a benched state happened when I was 16. I’m not about to go into the details of the background sob story but, suffice to say, I was going through a really rough time and I had gone to my happy place, my Nanna’s house in Chapel St Leonards, to straighten my head out. After having poured my heart out to my Nan she did what I believe to be one of the best things anyone could ever do for a person. She took me by the hand… walked arm in arm with me to the local supermarket… and bought a pre-cooked rotisserie chicken. We went and sat on a bench, by the bus stop and she just made me feel like I would be OK. She was never the sort to make the world out to be cupcakes and rainbows, she never gave me delusions of grandure. She had a way of just making you feel like you would be alright. No judgment. No attempts to steer me in the right direction. She just… was. With me. On a bench. Eating chicken.

There was nothing special about the bench. There was nothing special about the chicken. But there was something very special in that little picnic with just the right person. That is one of my most vivid and cherished memories of one of the most cherished people in my life and what she did for me. It was nothing really, but it was everything.

I haven’t eaten a chicken on a bench (until the other day) since that day in Chapel with my Nanna. But it is my go to memory when I feel low and need reminding that I’m just fine.

For me it was one of the more poignant moments of the day. We were chatting about the list and Kyli said something along the lines of how eating a chicken on a bench wouldn’t mean much to anyone else but how people should find their own chicken on a bench. That’s the thing, for people that still don’t understand what this is, why it is that we are doing this – it’s very simple. This is therapy. It can be disguised as stupidity, dressed up as silliness and passed off as fun, but ultimately and most importantly, this is healing. This is facing fear and finding hope, growing and learning. There are millions of people trying to wade their way through life, with millions of ways of coping with all the worries, the disappointments, the failures, and the pitfalls. Some people medicate, some people meditate, some people have their sister push them around a field in a shopping trolley. Shit things happen in life. You get hurt, you get challenged and you don’t always get what you want. It can sometimes seem like you don’t have the time or the ability to stop for a second and work out what it is you really need to get you through. It turns out I needed a chicken on a bench, just as much as Kyli did, and probably a lot more than I (or I) realised.

We appreciate that you may look at some of these things and think to yourself, "How did that even get on the list? That's not a challenge!" and you'd be right. Not everything on the list is a challenge. Quite a few of the things we'll be doing are purely there for shits and giggles, the idea was never for everything to be uber difficult.

We created the list after realising how easy it is to get stuck in a monotonous rut in life, when daily routines become dull and dreary, and something happened to make us realise that life is too short for dreary monotony. Breaking habits, any habits, is hard and takes time and effort. The list includes lots of seemingly easy, unchallenging things to do, but try to remember that the list, in it's ever evolving entirety, is one massive challenge and the point is to make changes, big ones and small ones, to make life better and more exciting. What makes life better and more exciting than just being a bit silly sometimes? That, my friends, is how those things made it onto the list and these are the sorts of things you should absolutely make sure you include in your own lists!! (You should totally make your own lists!)

You may have read Holly's post about being patient and her dismay when she realised that after creating the list there are actually a lot of days where nothing really happens at all. We can't all be running marathons, climbing mountains and bungee jumping every day to keep the excitement going. Unfortunately, not only would that get very expensive and probably very tiring, it'd quite likely take some of the excitement away from it. I'd be tempted to say that the little things are more important than the big, difficult things because the little things are the ones that get you through those inbetweeny days that don't feel quite so accomplished.

If I had one hope for this blog, it isn’t for lots of readers or to gain anything from it in terms of recognition – it is that people will share this journey with us. I hope that by reading it you can laugh with us (and often at us) and maybe make your own list. I hope that you can celebrate the small, seemingly mundane things that get you through. I hope that you can do things you never thought you could do. Most of all, I sincerely and fervently hope that you too find your chicken on a bench.

Holly

[thedaywebuiltthefort-blog]

No 95 - Become A Published Author (a work in progress)

When I was little, my primary school English teacher told my parents that I was a very good writer but that I should stop trying to write in other genres and stick to shawls and petticoats.

In retrospect, as annoyed as that made me at the time, he was probably onto something. The majority of my characters these days do in fact wear shawls and petticoats - mostly the female ones but not always.

Just to be clear about this, I have always written. There is a huge difference between someone that writes and someone who is trying to be a writer. In my case, the shift from one to the other has been quite recent. I wish I had done it a long time ago.

In my head though, there was always this image of what I believed an author should look and sound like. Sometimes I feel like I ought to be more thespian like, more academic. I should extend my social circle to include a variety of artistic, creative types that sit around coffee shops discussing theology and Greek tragedy. I feel like I should own a lot more scarves.

I’d like to join a writers circle or club but I’m too paranoid that when I get there they’ll want to ask me questions about Tolstoy or get me to give my opinions on neoclassical literature. My favourite author is Steven Pressfield. The last thing I read was Yahoo news.

I don’t have a beautiful antique desk upon which my manuscripts sit in neat piles. I don’t spend sunny days sitting in the garden drinking tea and scribbling genius ideas into a notepad. I tried to use a typewriter once and spent three hours trying to type one word.

In comparison to the image in my head, the reality of writing is much less glamorous.

Most of my work is done at the kitchen table, empty red bull cans wedged between piles of washing that has been sitting there so long I can no longer tell if it’s dirty or clean. Every ten minutes I have to remove a cat from my keyboard. As far as the sun goes, unless I have something particular to do, I often go days without seeing it. It seems like the ideal time to write is at about two thirty in the morning after twelve cups of instant coffee.

I have become a master of midnight editing, sitting in bed on my phone and saying things like ‘what the hell does that mean?’ and ‘what was I thinking?’ whilst trying not to wake up the rest of the house. Writing seems to amount to spending 20% of your time typing, 20% of your time lamenting over the awfulness of your work and the rest of the day googling things like ‘do frogs have toes?’ and ‘when were kettles invented?’ for research purposes.

Every day I seem to stumble across some new rule in the idiots guide to becoming an author. Rules that I had no idea existed. Things like the fact that you’re not allowed to use most of the words that exist in the English language. Even then you find most of the words you can use, have been used incorrectly.

It is all ridiculously complicated. Traversing the murky waters of editing, querying and getting work out there is akin to trying to find your way out of a dark room with your face covered in mashed potato. Working out what you should and shouldn’t be doing is like a Lord Of The Rings-esque quest. I feel like I need to spend eight hours walking across a mountain landscape so that I can fling my manuscript into the flames of Mordor.

I’m expecting a response via ork in twelve to sixteen weeks.

Several months after my first submission I can confirm I am no closer to being the next literary sensation than I was when I started, although I do now have much less memory space on my laptop. I have three and a half completed manuscripts in various stages of editing. The folder on my desktop contains roughly 480,000 words of my pure unbridled genius. It contains a further 500,000 words of total garbage.

The first novel, a fantasy adventure, is in the process of being beta read. I have convinced myself several times now, that it is in fact completely finished. That idea has turned out to be very much incorrect. I have put it out to agents and the response has been the same from each. It’s not what they’re looking for at the moment. I suspect I am getting stock answers but at least none of them have told me to never contact them again, or taken out restraining orders. There has actually been one or two that have in fact been quite encouraging.

Writing a novel is easy. The difficult bit is writing a novel that is a) actually good and b) people will want to read. Anyone can vomit words onto a page – something that I have proven consistently for the past year.

My first novel was written in a matter of several weeks. Granted, over those several weeks I was sitting hunched over the kitchen table for eighteen hours a day and my fingers ended up like gnarled flesh stumps, but still, it was done pretty quickly. It has since been rewritten at least twenty times. I’m still not happy with it.

I once read somewhere that a first draft is like shovelling sand into a box so that you can build sand castles with it later. If that is the case, editing feels like trying to bail out a waterlogged sailing boat with a teaspoon. You know there’s something salvageable in there somewhere, but you get the horrible feeling it’s going to sink before anyone else can see it.

I’ve started putting out some of my work on Wattpad, which is a way for writers to publish their work online for critique and feedback. The novel that is on there is one that has been knocking around in the back of my brain for about three years.

Unlike the fantasy novel, this one is turning out to be much tougher to write. I can feel it crawling around under my skin, but it seems to be like one of those itches that you can’t quite scratch. The minute you know where it is, it moves somewhere else. All of a sudden I am much more aware of what is going into the story. I find myself scrutinizing every word obsessively. I hate it all. A few hours later I love it again.

Mostly I am just worried that I’ve made a horrible mistake. It is one thing to sit at your kitchen table pouring your soul into something only for it to sit on your computer screen where only you can see it. Putting your work out there for other people to read and judge feels like standing at a precipice waiting to fling yourself over the edge.

I wake up in the morning and my first thought is about writing. As I fall asleep my last thoughts each night are about writing. It has consumed my life and is both wonderful and exhausting in equal measure. I am no longer just me. There are dozens of characters living and breathing inside my head. I know them, I feel them. When they get hurt, when they feel something – I feel it too. Maybe that makes me crazy. Perhaps it makes me passionate. I’m not quite sure yet.

Either way, it is that more than anything that drives me to keep going. It is an overwhelming need to bring life to these characters. I need to make them real. I need to tell their stories.

The truth of the matter is, that in the end, it doesn’t really matter if I get published or not. It would be amazing if it happened. But I don’t know that I’m good enough for that. I don’t know if I can compete against the millions and millions of people putting work out there, fighting for a place at the table. People ask you what’s special about you, what’s special about your work. I can’t answer that. I don’t know the answer. It’s probably nothing.

All I know is that these are my stories and writing them feels like breathing. Every time one of these characters moves from my brain, through my fingers and out onto the page, I feel like I have become a little more of myself. Each time I complete a project, it completes a little bit more of me and I feel like a better person for it.

I know I may come to regret some of the choices that I’ve made in recent months further down the line. I’ve given up an awful lot to do this (mostly money). The sensible part of me keeps trying to tell me that I ought to go back to working nine to five, and just write as and when I get the time.

The last decade of my life has been spent pursuing one horrible, spirit-crushing job after the other, each time convincing myself that I was climbing the ladder only to find myself unceremoniously shoved back down. It wasn’t until I sat down and poured my heart and soul out onto the screen that I realised how miserable I had made myself.

The best way I can put it is that as each character comes to life, so do I. I’ve never felt that way about anything before. That is why whenever I hear that voice in my head telling me to be realistic, to get on the job sites and start acting like a sensible person, I tell that voice to shut its face. Then I listen to the other voice - the one that says do not stop.

                       Holly

[thedaywebuiltthefort-blog]

Sweatember - 30 days of ache and the reality of exercise challenges

Well, Sweatember is over.

I went to the gym yesterday for my final push, trying to get in as many miles as possible before the challenge came to an end. If you don’t know what Sweatember is - firstly, it means you haven’t read the other posts on this blog, so please go and do that now…I’ll wait here - it is a 30-day challenge in which people exercise every day for a whole month to raise money for Cancer Research UK.

Anyone who knows me at the moment will know that exercising every day for a month doesn’t constitute much of a challenge. My usual routine will see me in the gym, out running or at a work out class about five times a week, so to go from that to daily wasn’t a huge leap.

With this in mind, I decided to add a little extra to the challenge and gave myself the goal of reaching 100 miles by track or gym before 30th September.

I hit the target on day 26 and after that, I was into bonus miles. All things considered, I am pretty pleased with the results. Usually, after a challenge, I spend a few days berating myself for not having done better.  I am trying to keep in mind that whilst this was going on, I was still working, writing and continuing my usual gym routine. This wasn’t an either-or situation. I was still weight training, rowing, crunching, lunging and dragging sandbags up and down the gym on a semi-daily basis. Apparently, I am a glutton for punishment.

In the end, I managed the very healthy total of 117.38 miles. It worked out at around a 25% running and 75% static bike split - this was entirely strategic as time constraints often meant it was easier to bike. I can achieve a much greater distance on a much shorter time on the bike than I can on the track or treadmill.

There were definitely some days that were easier than others - on my best days I was achieving upwards of eight miles and on the worst, I was barely scraping one. I mostly found that the bad days were more to do with my own state of mind than the aching…and yes, I did ache, a lot - constantly. Anyone doing regular exercise will tell you that you need to give your muscles a day off to recover every now and again, which wasn’t an option during this month.

I had some great support from family, friends and my co-workers at the office and altogether managed to raise £212.50 including gift aid. If I add that to the £314 that Kylie raised doing the UWCB event that makes £526 for Cancer Research so far.

With marathon training looming (aiming for an end of November start) it seems like now would be a good time to take a break. However, I am who I am and as such I was naturally awake at 2am this morning, googling Spartan races and 100km hikes whilst in bed. As soon as one challenge comes to an end, I can’t help but start searching for the next one. I need something in my life constantly to aim for otherwise I become adrift.

One other thing I wanted to talk about whilst reviewing my experience of Sweatember was the physical changes to my body. I have added in some pictures below to illustrate the point that I am about to make. Obviously, the first picture is on day one and the second picture was taken today. You can see clearly the effect that Sweatember has had on my muscles, size, and weight.

As mentioned earlier, I am already pretty physical at the moment and during the course of this challenge aside from my levels of activity going up, not much else changed. My calorie intake went up slightly and I was a bit more relaxed about what I was eating but for the most part, I was still quite healthy.

The reason I have posted the pictures below is that I think sometimes people need to see the true results of one of these ‘do something for 30 days and blah blah blah…’ challenges. I hear about it all the time - it’s in magazines, online and in our faces 24/7.

One week to washboard abs! 30 days to a six pack! Summer body in six minutes! All of them dirty, dirty lies. Now I’m not saying don’t do these things - I do them myself all the time. What I am saying is look below. This is the truth of the matter.

What you are seeing is the result of 30 days of continued work - running, cycling, walking, crunching, jumping, lifting, throwing….and as you can see I now have the body of a greek goddess. Except that I don’t. I have no six pack, I haven’t really lost any weight and as you can tell my thighs still have that weird baking muffin like effect.

The last thing I want to do is put people off doing these things - I am 100% telling you to go out there and do as many awesome, fun, silly, physical challenges as you can. What I am saying though is be kind to yourself. Don’t get weighed down and disheartened because you don’t seem to be achieving the kind of amazing results the magazine or webpage promised.

I know of so many people who have tried these quick fixes and fad diets and they all fall at the first hurdle because they feel like they are failing. There are no shortcuts and there is a monstrous industry out there designed to feed into your self-doubt and insecurities. Each time I open my web browser I’m confronted by images of bronzed beauties with waists the size of rubber bands and they try to tell me that if I do what they say I too can look just like that.

What they don’t tell you is that the image you’re looking at is of someone who already had the kind of body I aspire to before I even start. They photoshop them. They use great lighting and filters. I know that if I stand in a certain light I can make it look like I have abs. I can promise you now that I don’t. Occassionally I’ll get the slightest trace of a bit of muscle in the bit between my rib cage and naval but as soon as I’ve seen it, it disappears into hiding again. Either that or I just eat a sandwhich and it’s gone.

The reality of it is that those pictures you see of toned abs and washboard stomachs are pictures of people who already live in the gym six hours a day, seven days a week. If you go in believing that you can shortcut your way to a great body then you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment. It is a long haul journey, not a short hop.

Be good to yourselves, be realistic and do it because you want to achieve something for yourself aside from ‘a great bikini body’. Don’t be disheartened when you don’t get that model body straight away.

30 days isn’t long enough to achieve and maintain those kinds of results - think of it as more of a warm-up and keep going. Do more, push harder and keep going. You will get there in the end. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Celebrate each little victory - big or small - and keep in mind that this is a journey that you’re on. Each mile you add, each step you take IS getting you there and victory will be all the sweeter when you realise that rather than changing your body, you’ve actually gone and changed your life.

Anyway, I am going to keep this short and sweet as I have some important googling to do - I can already feel the call of the next challenge. Bring it on.

Holly                                                                                         

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No 67 and friends - Girls weekend away (featuring No's 19, 39, 45, 72 and 74)

I chose to credit this one mainly as no 67 because that was primarily what I was doing but actually it’s going to have a few sub-posts within as my girls weekend away (actually it was five days!) allowed me the opportunity to tick a couple of other items off the list as well.

I am knocking on the door of my 30th birthday and I have never been on a girls holiday. I met my husband just after my 18th birthday and we’ve been together ever since so any holidays I’ve been on since I was old enough to do holidays without my parents have been with him and, subsequently, with my own kids in tow.

As much as I love taking our kids on holidays and having the chance to spend time with them without worrying about cooking dinner or doing the housework, I don’t really consider them holidays. I don’t find them relaxing. I mostly find that it’s just moving my family temporarily to another country where I still have to be Mum, obviously as I’m a Mum, and I miss the times when hubby and me could just take our time with a holiday. So I was very keen to take up the chance to have a non-Mumming holiday when presented with the opportunity.

I have just come home after a wonderful break away with my good friend Jen. We jetted off to spend five fabulously chilled out days filled with sun, sea, Sangria and sticky sticks (I’ll explain later) at her aunt’s apartment in Fuerteventura.

The weather was just totally delicious at a steady 27/28 degrees throughout and I am sat here sufficiently bronzed, obviously I’m sporting a lovely cream coloured jumper to show off my tantasticness to my living room.

Sub-post 1 - No 19. Say yes when you feel like you should say no

Call me Vicky Pollard because in the run up to this I was very much in a ‘yer but noo but’ frame of mind. Jen first asked me if I wanted to go with her and I was like “Hell yeah!” but then, being a parent and wife the inevitable “but that money could go towards other things” and “it’s not fair for me to go away and not my family” thoughts crept in and I shied away from the idea. Jen kept checking in on whether I was up for it, I was always up for it, I just couldn’t justify the expenditure and it didn't seem fair so I think I’d been erring more towards not going, much as I wanted to. Then Jen mentioned it infront of my husband and he asked me why I hadn’t mentioned it to him? I simply told him that I hadn’t felt it was fair. He immediately told me I should take the opportunity and run with it. I still felt like it was a bit unfair and that I should probably say “No it’s OK” but, given the green light and with the list in mind I agreed and we booked the flights. I took a bit of coaxing to actually say yes but in the end I had a fab break away from Blighty.

Sub-post 2 - No 74 Be lazy for a whole day

This one came quite easily once away in the sun without kids to worry about. Jen and I spent our second day at the beach and we spent the whole entire day laying on sun loungers and not doing much else. We had a little paddle in the sea where shoals of fish swam around our legs. Jen kinda freaked out but I loved it and could’ve spent hours just stood there watching. We sauntered up to the snack bar for a light bite when we felt a bit peckish and sauntered back to the loungers afterwards to laze around some more.

Whilst there we couldn’t help but notice that quite a few of our fellow female sun worshippers had dared to go topless! Not just lying down where they might not draw too much attention to themselves, but going about their days as usual. Hangers out with their bangers out and at first I felt a little awkward. Not knowing where to look and muttering to Jen that there were children around. But then the more I thought about it and the more it became apparent that literally nobody gave a toss about it, the more it occurred to me that I was being really prudish and actually I started to admire their confidence; a confidence I don’t have. I could never have the steel to dare do that in public. There were boobs all over the place belonging to women of various shapes, sizes and ages, the vast majority of them bigger and/or older than me, each one of them sporting their own unique patterns of sunburnt vs pastey battenburg-ery and not one of them looked even slightly embarrassed to be strolling along, or swimming, or standing and watching the world go by in just their bikini bottoms. I started to feel a bit envious of them. This leads neatly on to my next sub-post….

Sub-post 3 - 39 Be brave/45 Stop worrying about what other people think

After our day at the beach Jen and I had made jokes about our white bits. I had the perfect outline of my strapless bikini top across my chest and a perfect white triangle on my bum, you could be fooled into thinking I was still wearing my bikini had you seen me with no clothes! I asked how we could even ourselves out a bit and the subject of going topless cropped up. We both said something to the effect of “oh no I couldn’t possibly”. I was not blessed with the same chesticular endowment that the rest of the women in my family have been and it’s a bone of contention for me. I thought to myself, maybe if I put on some swimming trunks and tie my hair back I could give it a go because anyone walking past would just think I’m a dude!

There is an adults only sun terrace at the apartment complex where we were staying and we spent a fair bit of time up there. There was almost always at least one woman up there toasting her baps and in the end I decided screw it, I’m going to be brave, even if someone does have a problem with it, why should I care? They don’t know me and I’ll never see them again. Not wanting to sound big headed or judgmental, of course I have my own body gripes, but I am in a lot better shape than most of these women and they don’t care, why should I be so worried? We decided to take a leaf out of their body confidence books and cast aside our insecurities. So on our final day, we found a corner up on the sun terrace where there wouldn’t be too much traffic coming by (baby steps) and stripped down from the bikini bottoms up - no photo evidence of this I’m afraid! At first I felt very uncomfortable but after awhile it felt liberating and I was glad to have been able to shed some of my worries and just relax.

Sub-post 4 - No. 72 Bugger the calories

As it’s her aunts apartment Jen and I were on a self-catering stay. So over the five days we went into the Hiperdino over the road from the complex and bought a few supplies. This did include some fruit and salad as we didn’t want to go too heavy but, during one of these shopping trips we discovered something life changing… a pastry delight we affectionately named sticky sticks. As the name states, they were sticky and they were stick shaped. They were rolled up puff pastry with a kind of custardy filling and covered in some kind of sticky fantasticalness and dusted with icing sugar. They also had chocolate filled ones which were equally finger licking as their custard counter-parts.

We also made a couple of visits to a little ice-cream stall in the middle of one of the shopping alleys which served an amazing cheesecake flavoured ice-cream!

On our last night we went out for a meal at a Chinese restaurant just across from the apartment. A bargain set menu meal at 14euros a head and enough food to feed four easily, we scoffed the lot between us and rolled back to the apartment (picking up another couple of sticky sticks on the way past for later) and in the airport waiting for the flight home we caned an enormous Burger King and now I am pretty certain I don’t want to eat again for the rest of the week!!

I missed my girls and my husband very much and it was wonderful to come home to some very enthusiastic kisses and cuddles but, after a pretty rubbishy rollercoaster of a year so far, it was just wonderful to have the opportunity to take a break and have a bit of time for me to relax with a friend, some Sangria and sticky sticks!!

So I’ll finish up with a huge thank you to Jen for inviting me, for continually checking I hadn’t wimped out and for being great company. Also huge thanks to my husband for encouraging me to go and for holding down the fort at home, I am more grateful to them both than they could know.

Kyli

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Suicide Prevention Day Post: PTSD - my story

10th September is suicide prevention day.

This post is inspired by and written in homage to my brave friends and family who have spoken out about their own experiences of mental health, depression and the struggle that comes with hitting rock bottom and having to claw your way back out of that big black hole.

Have I ever been suicidal? That’s an interesting question and one that I don’t know how to answer entirely honestly. I don’t remember ever feeling an urge to kill myself. I do however remember knowing at one point, several years ago, that I didn’t want to be anymore. That I just didn’t want to live anymore. I don’t know if that is the same thing.

Either way, this came at the time I was suffering from PSTD.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a condition mostly affiliated with the military and those in service. The truth of it is that it affects many people for many reasons. It is unbiased and unprejudiced in its attack.

I know for a fact that there is a stigma of shame attached to it when you are not in military service. People assume that you can’t possibly have difficulty processing a traumatic event when you haven’t done a tour of Iraq or been in a war zone. For a long time, I didn’t like to admit that I had it, even after being diagnosed.

My PTSD came (hand in hand with a lovely dose of PND) following the birth of my son when I was nineteen years old. I want to be careful to be respectful to those involved with this story, so, for this reason, I am focusing solely on the effects the experience had on my mental and emotional health.

It was not an easy experience. I went two weeks over my due date. I was terrified. The skin on my stomach had stretched to the point of splitting in two (I still have the scars) and I had something called ICP (Intrahepatic Cholestasis of Pregnancy) which I won’t explain in detail, but that essentially causes extreme itching during the third trimester.

Let me just elaborate on that for a moment – when I say itching, I don’t mean it’s a little bit annoying. After a few weeks of constant blood tests (at one point I’m not even sure I had any blood left to be taken) and not being able to sleep I was literally ready to tear my own skin off. I have never known anything like it and I hope to never again. If I had been able to get my hands on any I would have sandpapered my skin raw.

The birth itself was hard and after 48 hours in labour, I knew it wasn’t going to be natural. I told the doctors. They ignored me. I was left for another day – terrified, in pain until eventually they conceded and I was knocked out cold for an emergency section. It is hard to admit even now, but at the time I was trying to act like I wasn’t afraid, like I was mature and in control. In reality, there was a voice in my head that told me I was going to die. The hardest part about that is that I wasn’t afraid anymore at that point. I was so ready for it to be over I really didn’t care anymore.

Several hours later I woke up, was shown a baby and pretty much left to my own devices. I left the hospital after what I think was either nine or ten days and beyond that I have no memories of what happened at all. I don’t remember who came to visit me or when. I don’t remember the first time I held my own child. My memories were wiped completely and to this day there is still a blank space in my mind where those first few days should have been.

So now you know what caused the PTSD.

Realistically, I would say it was eight years before I started to recover in any meaningful way. Although I do remember a lot from the years that followed there are still huge patches in my memory where there is missing information, especially from the early months.

I don’t remember the first time I actually felt anything afterward. I was on autopilot for a long time. Actually, to say I didn’t feel anything was a lie. I felt anger and bitterness. I felt cheated and betrayed by the world and by my own body.

For a long time, I was lost in what became an almost consuming anger that festered like a poison. Everybody has different symptoms and reactions to trauma. There was a long time where I was determined to destroy myself in any way possible. I pushed people away becaue I felt incapable of loving and unworthy of being loved. I was numb all over. Bad decisions, poor life choices, toxic relationships with people who fed my demons...

I had recurring nightmares both sleeping and waking. I saw visions of babies with their skulls being crushed. I sat at work and saw visions of doctors smeared in blood, masked faces looking down at me. I went to visit a friend who had recently give birth and, as she proudly passed me her newborn daughter to hold, I ran to the car and locked myself in. I sat there in the passenger seat hyperventilating and crying. I threw up in the seat well.

I started avoiding people because I didn't want to see their children. I lost friends because of it.

Babies terrified me. I didn’t want to hold them or be around them. I felt like I was incapable of feeling anything other than fear. People would assume (because I’m a girl obvs) that I would love to hold their children.

When my niece was born, my sister’s husband posted a lovely announcement on Facebook. I flew into a complete rage. I was so angry at the world. That night I remember as being probably the worst of all the times my PTSD had taken over. I was howling like an animal, tears pouring down my face as I lay on the floor and screamed at my OH that I didn’t want to live anymore.

The next day he quietly and carefully removed all the sharp instruments from our house and locked away anything that I might be able to use to hurt myself.

It took four therapists, cognitive behavioural therapy, EMDR therapy, counselling and several years before I could even come close to believing I could beat the demons. When I received the letter from the hospital when my son was eight years old confirming my diagnosis I cried tears of sheer relief.

I don’t feel any shame. I freely admit that I was not a pleasant person during that time. I call it the ‘wilderness’ years and in some ways, I wish that things had been different. In other ways, I don’t wish it had been different at all. Everything that happened made me who I am now.

It still annoys me when people don't understand why it is I can have one child and not want another one, as if having babies should be the sole purpose of my life. I usually just tell them that I don't need another one, I got it 100% spot on the first time (that's true actually, my son is ridiculously cool). People have this expectation that there is something beautiful, natural and almost transcendent about the experience. It would have been nice if that had been the case.

I have an amazing kid, who is now a teenager. Our relationship is really close, but it doesn’t stem from a natural maternal instinct. It comes from fighting for it. I have had to learn how to be a parent and it’s been a tough battle from day one. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I will probably never feel like, as I imagine it to be, a motherly mother. I’m more like a wild feral mum. I’ll never coo over baby pictures or feel all warm and fuzzy inside at the thought of tiny infants.

But I will show my son what it is to fight back. The lessons I provide are ones in how to keep going. Hopefully, it’ll prove beneficial in the long run to both of us.

So there you go, that is my story in a very condensed nutshell.

I’ve spoken before about the state of my body post-pregnancy. Almost fourteen years later and the scars are still there. I will never be able to look in a mirror again without seeing them. The memories are always there, staring back at me.

It took a while to come to terms with that.

But the emotions and mental side of it are now at the point where much like the marks on my body; they feel more like a faded scar than an open wound. They’re there and that’s fine.

I hope that by sharing this, it puts what we are doing and why we started this blog into perspective. It hasn’t always been about living our best lives – there have been times when it has just been about surviving. I’m not ashamed of my story. I’m not ashamed of my body. I’m not ashamed of the truth. There is nothing shameful in admitting that you needed or need help. Every voice that speaks out and says 'this is my story' is another voice that can be heard by someone who needs to know that they are NOT ALONE.

I had PSTD.

I will be forever changed by that experience.

I am who I am now because of it.

I have never felt more powerful in my life.

This is me.

Holly

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No 13 - Be impulsive

I have been eyeing this one up for awhile, wondering what I can do and in what ways I could be impulsive. Reading it, hearing it, saying it makes me feel like I should do something drastic, something big that will make people say "Ermagherd! I can't believe she did that!" and that kind of felt like it'd be something expensive or that might have long term repercussions... like an in promptu trip to Vegas or getting a questionable tattoo. And then there's the fact that the very definition of impulsive is "acting or done without forethought" and I've spent a lot of time fore thinking, rendering the whole exercise moo.

It wasn't until yesterday, when I was celebrating my 7th wedding anniversary, that it dawned on me that being impulsive doesn't necessarily mean being brash or out there or splashing a lot of cash or doing something daft. It just means doing something spur of the moment. Obviously we had a plan in the sense that we knew would be spending a particular day together and yes, we had to pre-arrange childcare for the day and we did book a particular place to go for lunch. But for the rest of the day we didn't want to be rushing around to be in certain places at certain times for certain activities, we just went where the day took us.

We started off taking the roof down on the car so that we could blow away some cobwebs on a leisurely drive to a lovely little town called Bridgnorth. When we got there the place looked deserted so we decided not to hang around and carried on driving until we ended up not too far away from where we would be having lunch. So we had a little browse around a lovely little farm shop, bought a few treats - one of which was a rather scrumptious bottle of cherry Bakewell vodka, courtesy of Tipsy Tart. Tasty tipple in a wonky bottle - suits me down to the ground!

Then we went for lunch at the place where we got married (I know this is the planned bit of our day so is irrelevant to the point of being impulsive but it was just so lovely I'm going to write a bit about it!) We got chatting to the lady who was serving us and we told her that we were there for our anniversary and that we'd gotten married there. We practically relived our wedding dinner and it was just a delicious as I remembered it being, tasted like memories! When they brought out my dessert - a milk and white chocolate mousse with orange anglais and tuile biscuit the chef had piped "Happy 7th Anniversary" in chocolate around the edge of the plate. It was so lovely! Then he came out and spoke to us like we were old friends. "Nice to see you again" he said as he shook our hands and congratulated us like he knew exactly who we were (despite the fact he blatantly wouldn't have had a clue after 7 years!)

Afterwards we went into Shrewsbury and parked near the Quarry Park and went for a little stroll towards the river where there is a boat that does river trips every hour and it just so happened that we arrived by the dock just as they were about to board for the next ride. So we hopped aboard and cuddled up on the top deck to watch the world go by and to view our home town from a different angle. On the way up the river we just chatted and had a drink and pointed things out to each other, on the way back down the river the skipper gave a commentary about the town's history. We found out things we never knew about the place, after 5 years of living there.

When we got off the boat we went for a walk around town and wandered down some roads we've never walked down before, ended up in a part of the park we never knew existed, which included walking through a pasture where Old English Longhorn cattle graze which is just part of the public park. They're not fenced in, just wandering around as we were. The whole time we were just chatting about life and plans for the future.

When we got back to the car we took the roof down again and meandered back in the vague direction of collecting our children, stopping at a couple of pubs along the way in a sort of long distance, countryside mini pub crawl (don't worry, I wasn't a Tipsy Tart until we were safely back home)

Now I know that you may read this, if you even made it this far through a post about what may seem like a bit of a boring day to many, and think that we didn't do anything really very exciting and therefore could argue was it really impulsive? I would argue that it was. Other than our lunch destination we completely made the day up as we went along and we did it in our own time, at our own pace and that was by far one of the most lovely things about it.

We live in a world where everything is so fast paced, everybody wants everything doing yesterday, constantly clock watching, on our phones, racing to be here there and everywhere... my husband and I know all to well what this is like. Until yesterday I had as good as forgotten what he looks like. He works very hard and recently has had to work very very long hours whilst setting up a new business, constantly worrying about deadlines. Yesterday was one of the best days I've had in a really really long time because we got a very rare day to ourselves.

Whatever happened to just slowing down? Not caring what the clock says or what needs doing tomorrow. You will just have to take my word for it that this is what we did, you may notice that there are no photo attachments to this post as proof that we did any of these things. That's because, rather than posing to show the world what we were doing, we just allowed ourselves to be in the moment. If being impulsive means "doing without forethought" then that means live in the moment. Don't mistake this for thinking that the impulse is just the snap decision, you need to be in the whole moment. Otherwise there's no point.

This post is entitled "Be Impulsive" but that doesn't mean you have to go and be an adrenaline junkie like I thought it did. Honestly, if you haven't for awhile, give it a try. Have a day with your partner, or friends, or even on your own and just slow the hell up. Breathe and take in what's around you. Everything else is so fast paced, things are so easily missed in the every day routine rush. Don't plan anything. Just wander. Just go. Just be. See what happens.

Kyli

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Sweatember Week One

I’d like to start this post off by saying that this is actually the second time I have written this.

The first time was pre-day eight Sweatember gym session and it was, to be frank, a load of total bull. I realised post gym session that what I had written was what I thought people would want to hear – namely that things were going great and I hadn’t encountered a single problem.

However I want to be honest about everything that we do both for this list and for ourselves. So with that in mind, welcome to my experience so far of ‘Sweatember’ – a 30 day challenge in which I have to work out every day with the added target of hitting 100 miles before the end of the month.

About an hour ago I was sitting on the bike in the gym, pouring sweat like it’s raining down on the handlebars and asking myself why in the heckin heck I am doing this. My hair is plastered to the back of my neck. The other gym users around me are keeping a wary distance which I can’t judge them for being as how I smell like a dog’s arse. I don’t wear make up to go to the gym but what little residual face was left has now melted like a wax work in a blast furnace.

I don’t actually care about any of that. However, as I sit there pedalling my little legs off I start thinking that it’s very likely that nobody actually considers this to be a challenge or in any way difficult. Nobody is going to read a blog post about a random bird from the Midlands sitting on a bike or flailing about a treadmill every day for a month. If you are reading this, hats off to you and thanks for proving me wrong.

I think this about almost everything we do and almost everything on the list. If I run a mile I worry that someone else has run five and therefore my efforts are rendered null and pointless. If I run ten miles someone else has run a marathon.

Having done this for eight days straight now, I would say to anyone thinking that it’s a piece of piddle to actually try doing it themselves. Granted, there are a lot of people who could wipe the floor with me, but on the other hand there are a lot of people who would be surprised at just how difficult it is to motivate yourself to get out every single day without fail. No breaks. No days off. No excuses.

The first few days actually did go great. I felt energised. I felt refreshed. I even wore a crop top in the gym for the first time in my entire life and didn’t panic about it. I don’t love the fact that the loose skin on my belly resembles a spaniel’s ear when I do push ups, but overall I felt the pros outweighed the cons. I’ve been well over average most days which put me ahead of the game for the rest of the month.

By day five the muscles in my legs were starting to develop a mind of their own. I’ve been so caught up in strength and core training, building muscle mass and toning that my cardio has gone by the wayside for about three months now. What with the amount of cardio I’ve been put in over the week, my arm muscles (which had been starting to resemble actual limbs with actual muscles) have reverted back to their former twig like status.

Day six came and went, and at this point I started to feel really tired. It was a push to get the miles in for the last two days of the week both in terms of physical tiredness and the mental and emotional pressures of those two days.

My normal healthy diet went out of the window on day seven – pictorial evidence supplied below for your viewing pleasure. I haven’t seen a salad in nine days. Carbohydrates are my only friends now. Before my gym session tonight I shovelled so much pasta into my face that you could have backed it up in a dumper truck and just tipped it into my gob. I keep telling myself that Haribo Strawbs don’t actually count as a fruit (although they blatantly should).

So it's come to this.....

I’ve spent more time than I’d like to spend this week running up and down to hospitals, between shifts and different people in my capacity as support/bag carrier/company giver, taking care of business and generally attempting to make myself as useful as possible in whatever simple way I can.

I can tell you now, spending five hours in a hospital waiting room does not inspire the motivation to go for a couple of miles worth of track run, especially if it’s raining, which it was.

It does however put a lot of things into a new perspective for you.

The entire time I’ve been doing this I have always held on to the steadfast belief that everything in life is relative – pain, success, challenges, fights, victories- whatever you have, do, win, achieve, there will always be someone who is two steps in front of you and someone who is two steps behind you.

I’ve had my challenges to meet and my demons to conquer in the past and no doubt I will have more to deal with in the future. One of these days I intend on writing a post about my experiences with PTSD and PND, but that’s a long story for another day. This is about the here and now, who I am now and who I hope to become over the course of this blog. It’s about the little challenges and the little victories; no matter how big or small they might seem to others.

Running/cycling 100 miles in a month might be a piece of cake for some people and well done to you if you are one of them, but it isn’t to other people. Whatever challenges you choose to take up and for whatever reason, do them because you never thought you could, not because other people have done them or better.

I have 22 days left of Sweatember and I know I’m not going to enjoy all of them, but I am going to enjoy the little rush I get at the end when I realise that it’s over and I can move on to whatever comes next. I’m going to enjoy raising money for Cancer Research (link provided) and I’m going to enjoy boring people to tears with my endless up dates.

Mostly I’m going to enjoy the bit when I get to day 30 and I can say to myself ‘well done me, I didn’t quit, even when I thought I probably should.’

https://fundraise.cancerresearchuk.org/page/holly-takes-on-sweatember-7?utm_medium=email&utm_source=mcmp&utm_campaign=18DFE6a&utm_content=18DFE6a001&utm_team=FPSWEATEMBER_IN_18DFE6a_Kickoff&urn=567612154

Here’s a breakdown of my daily mileage so far –

5.79 miles, 1.8 miles, 6.92 miles, 4.15 miles, 1.5 miles, 1.5 miles, 5.22 miles – total 26.88 miles

Holly

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