Breathing Space

It was all too much, my brain tired, my emotions battered.  Hauling myself out of bed at 4.30pm on a Monday afternoon, it was sink or swim. On autopilot I found my way into Tesco, a robot directed by the list in its hand. I was numb.

Another list: bivvy bag, stove, petrol, clothes, food. Squashing things smaller, discarding superfluous shit. How many nights? I don't know. I don't want to come back. The bag seems heavy, I don't know what else I can leave behind. 

In the morning, all I have to do is put the bag in the car. I'm driving in a bubble. I park where has been suggested. I walk. The bag is heavy. It is hot, I am not moving quickly. I don't care about speed, I don't really care where I am going, one foot in front of the other. People say hello. I don't want to engage. Someone says 'It's a beautiful view from up there.'.

The sun on my skin, the breeze in my face, the mountains around me. The numbness begins to lift but I am tired inside. I keep walking. I am alone. I am lost in my thoughts, talking out loud in a conversation with someone who isn't even there. I have lost what I think, I'm not sure what I feel. I talk and I think and it starts to make sense. I think.

I run out of water. I want a cup of tea. So I wander across the hillside until I find somewhere to hide, sheltered and nestled amongst the rocks. My phone signal is shit. This is a good thing. I'm only staying for the night, my hand forced by external forces. Perhaps that's for the best. I put the kettle on and as I relax in my soft nest, I cry. It all starts to come out. I eat a weird dinner, I have cous cous in my second cup of tea. I don't want to eat, it's a mechanical, necessary process. It's fuel, that's all.

Medicinal tea

Watching the sunset, the Herdwick sheep surround me, one looks at me, its head cocked to one side, an expression of curiosity on her face. It's like a huge release of emotion. Things I've bottled up for months. It all pours out. I am still talking, having that conversation through floods of tears, alone on a hillock watching the sun dogs in the sky.

I climb into my bivvy bag, everything illuminated by the moon, I miss all this caged up in my house in West Yorkshire. I look up to the stars, I don't know what the constellations are, I think of someone who would. The wind has dropped and lying there looking up at that huge moon and those beautiful stars and planets, I am struck by the beauty of the world. I tuck my little pillow under my head and  I sleep. Better than I have slept in months. 

Dawn

The mundanities of life

It has been some time since I wrote my blog. The realities of a very large deadline and accompanying imminent cessation in funds has seen me tied to my computer for more hours than I care to think about. And climbing still frightens me and being stressed out to the point of tears currently doesn't really feel like fun.

The Simple Chick says I go in phases, which is true, and this is a running phase, if it is anything. Running isn't stressful, unless I make it stressful, and it seems the perfect antithesis to thinking and writing about complex theoretical ideas relating to prehistoric archaeology. Work hard, run hard.

Pootling about on Ilkley Moor

I stopped running for several months earlier in the year, firstly due to injury and then because my entire world seemed to be constantly revolving at 90 miles per hours as I tried to spin more plates than I could really manage. But such times are unsustainable and eventually I reached a point where something had to change. On went my running shoes.

I am unfit now and it makes me sad that I wasted all the effort of last year by getting caught up in life for so long; in the moment, it is hard to see how much you have achieved or what you have become. I am not running as often as I was, I am tired and my body needs time to regain some of that previous fitness. But with renewed perspective, I think my attitude has changed, never am I going to not push myself as hard as I can, because that is who I am, but I can see now that running makes me feel significantly mentally and physically better and that is more important than race times or distances ever could be. I have remembered how much I love running off-road and I wish I still had the fitness of last year, not because I want to race or be fast, but because I want to be fit enough to go off into the wilderness, lace up my trainers and spend all day running over the mountains.