The gaps in this blog seem to get longer and longer… and I’m going to be open about why here, about things that up until now only my friends and family really know about here, largely because other people might be struggling in the same way as I have been.
I’m not going to spend too much time trying to summarise training and racing between 2014 and 2019. After coming back from Japan in April 2014, I was super-fit and ran all the Kingston Road Runners events for the rest of the year, and ended up winning my age-group category (40-49). But then depression and injury and lethargy all combined to ruin my next few years. I did a few events here and there and had enough residual fitness to do okay in some of them – I had a brief revival in mid-2017 and got some good results – but I was generally putting on weight and my mental state was increasingly out of control.
By 2018, I was starting to realise that something had to give – people had started asking me if I was okay and I couldn’t dismiss them any longer. And the strain of supporting other people, students with even worse problems in particular, at the same time as I was suffering was starting to tell. I’d really like to apologise to all the people I let down during this period. By the end of the year I finally got an appointment for psychiatric assessment and they confirmed what I’d been told twice before back in Britain – that I was bipolar and that I really needed medication. My psychiatrist was astonished that I had managed for 20 years without medication. I had long forgotten whatever justification I had for not taking anything, and instead I carefully examined the options with her before settling on small doses of Lithium. There was a time when Lithium was prescribed in large doses which had a debilitating effect on many people, but that’s not the case any more, at least in Canada. So long as your kidneys and thyroid can take it, small doses of Lithium are the thing. Incidentally, a side-effect of this, is that I now know I have the kidney function of a 20-something, which is very welcome news.
Since starting on Lithium in early 2019, my mood, anxieties, massive swings between mania and depression, have all stabilized. Is there a downside? There’s always a downside, and for someone who still thinks of themself as an active person, like me, it’s that Lithium can encourage you to be lethargic and gain weight. But then maybe it’s not a downside, maybe it’s a stimulus to getting back into training seriously again? And I certainly needed that. By the start of 2020, I weighed almost 70kg, about as much as I had ever weighed and more importantly, I was really out of competitive condition. I was still running occasionally, and cycle-commuting, but I’d almost entirely given up on the swimming and was doing nothing with any real purpose.
I realised how bad things were when, on a whim, a entered a 10k race (the TC10K) in Victoria in April 2019, when I was over there for an excellent workshop of the Big Data Surveillance project. Along with about 10,000 other people (yep, big race), on a beautiful morning, I ran a great course with several km along the coast with a view of the mountains across the water. Clearly I wasn’t going to break any records but I was really slow (47:52), and more importantly, it felt even worse, like I really could not have been any quicker.
So I did start running more again, but still not with any serious plan, and when I did the Beat Beethoven 8k in June, my favourite race, which I’ve finished in under 32:00 before, I got 35:53. Almost everyone else I used to measure myself against was between 2 and 4 minutes faster. I decided I was going to be back at 32:00 in 2020, and also push my distances again, and this meant the second half of 2019 was going to be very different from the first half, and very different from the four preceding years too… (to be continued)
Tri Till I Cry 