A blog in which I apparently make the case that I won at the Bupa London 10,000

As you get older you generally spend large portions of your day doing things you know how to do. At work I do things I am either double-plus-good-at, or can speak about using enough fancy-sounding acronyms to confuse people into thinking I am good at them.

So deciding to do a proper run (the Bupa London 10,000) was a bit of a shock to the system really. Because I am relatively bad at running. That is, relative to anyone else who has ever tried to run... and probably some people who have not. At school I was in the top set for Maths, Science, English... but in sport I was so bad that I was relegated to hockey, and as a result I didn't do much running after I finished education.

When I go out for a run, my brain tries to convince me it would be a good idea to stop, sit down and eat a biscuit.

Things that shut it up

1. Training, not trains

When you are going to do a run, you should apparently train for it. Confusingly, this doesn’t mean you catch a train instead of doing the run, it means you run instead of catching the train. I bullied myself into running by hiding running in my day (much like your Mum used to do with vegetables in lasagne). I can’t stand all the time that’s consumed by making a run an event in its own right, so I chopped down this time by running home from work, or part of the way. That way, I would only get home twenty minutes or so later, but fit in a 50 minute run, and then I could get on with my busy evening of sitting and biscuit eating.

2. The best things have a soundtrack

There is nothing, as far as I am concerned, as energising as a good song. I promise. Lucozade just haven’t figured out how to squish them into the bottles, but as soon as Willy Wonka starts making drinks that play your favourite song in your head, I’ll be the spoilt kid swigging them down before they’re through testing. Create a playlist of songs that make you smile and make you dance and instead of flagging at the third mile you’ll be half running, half dancing, laughing about a fun night out with your friends. It will divert your mind away from thinking crafty little things like ‘er, you could just, stop, you know?’ and trick you into having actual fun. Music is good at outwitting you.

3. Charity 

There are a lot of things that humanity is collectively responsible for which completely suck. Seriously. But equally there are some things we are actually awesome at. One of those things, in my opinion, is supporting our friends and their exercise goals by donating to worthwhile causes. Knowing that people had parted with their hard earned cash at my instruction and offered it up to help people with dementia meant I'd be pretty rubbish if I just stopped running. So I didn't.

4. Winning

Exercise can seriously take your sh*t. Seriously. You can bitch and whine about it. You can ignore it for a few days. You can begrudgingly acknowledge it for an hour before heading to the pub with your mates. But as long as you have some sort of relationship with it, however bad you might be, it does you good.

And really, if you incorporate exercise into your daily routine; have fun while you’re doing it; raise a load of money for a worthwhile cause and do yourself buckets of good, then you’re winning. Not at an actual race (where you come 10,317th), but at life.

A sort of explanation of why I am running for some people called Doris

I make a donation every month to the Alzeimer's Society. It's the first time I've ever donated without someone jumping out at me from behind a bush and speaking for so long about homeless dogs from impoverished nations with incurable diseases for so long that I handed over all my bank details. I actively sought out their donation form, and really this is an attempt for me to explain part of the reason why.

I am also running a 10k in support of their fight against dementia. I know 10k might seem like something you could do tomorrow, but it's something I have had to work very hard to hope to achieve. And actually I think it's pretty beautiful that we've developed the convention of motivating one another towards fitness and challenges by donating to organisations that make the world a better place. Well done humanity. Here is a win.

Here is my justgiving page, but please do read on also.

Inarticulately, some thoughts on why I support Alzheimer's Society

Both my grandmother, Doris, and my great aunt, also Doris, battled dementia in the later stages of their lives.


It's difficult to explain in what way this is an emotive issue for me, but I don't want to pretend I was close to my grandmother. It always seemed inevitable that I couldn't be close to her, precisely because of her dementia. He eulogy (in 2003) was a surprise to me, as my uncle remembered a family-oriented, smart, busy woman – and as much as those sorts of occasions don't elicit criticism or judgement, I felt that it was a shame that I didn't know in any depth, the character of this woman who people tell me I remind them of. Who makes up, in part, who I am.

What I did experience, second-hand, was the struggle for my parent's generation. My aunt once explained that she was on the phone to Doris, her mother, when Doris suddenly remarked 'anyway, I must go and check I have put my children to bed'. Stories like this become anecdotal – they encapsulate the confusion; the absurdity; the sometimes momentary and sometimes extended alienation from the world people with dementia face; and I'm sure every family who knows this disease has a similar story. I'm sure those people have far too many similar stories.

How much of what you are is shaped by your relationships? The person you were before you became a parent, the person you were before your parents split, the person you were before a painful break-up or divorce, even just the person you were a few days ago before you met a new friend... that's not the same person as you are today. In some way you are changed by those relationships and those relationships become important to you. My grandparents, on the other side of my family, have as much as said to me that the best thing about their lives, now they are not as mobile as they'd like, is seeing their children, seeing me and my brother, learning about our lives and sharing in our joys and achievments (and blog posts).

I can't imagine the impact, for both my aunt, and for my grandmother, that dementia had on their relationship, but exploring that anecdote in any real detail is like falling down the rabbit hole to not-so-Wonderland, it's the window to a world of dementia.

Just think, you speak to the woman who you spend your whole life knowing as your mother – who has guaranteed to have been there when you were born. Who has shaped her days, months and years around your life, your desires, your future – and you can't guarantee that she'll know who you are. Sometimes I can't buy a dress without wanting to check my Mum thinks it's nice. Sometimes I bake a cake and I just want to tell my Mum what it looked like. I can't guarantee she'll have any interest in what I have to say, but I do know that when she answers the phone she'll know who I am, and that by the end of the conversation she'll still be aware.

To be frank, it seems like a long-winded teaser-trailer for death. That person you love is sort-of there. Sometimes you'll show up and they'll be there, and sometimes they won't really be there. It's magic. It will look and smell and feel like them, but the trick is it won't really be them. Not always. Not anymore.

On the day my grandmother died her children noted they didn't feel some extreme pang of grief because it felt like they had slowly lost their mother over the past ten years, piece-by-piece.

But for her, for the grandmother I never really knew, well, this deterioration happened across the bredth of her life, to all her relationships. Every person was removed, forgotten, confused. One-by-one or all together. And really, she was alone. Not for the lack of a family, not for the lack of good-parenting, of working on those relationships over time, but because of this disease. In a conversation with someone she'd loved and nurtured there was no guarantee of those feelings, that history, that person, being remembered...

I think it's important to fight this illness, to conduct research into cures and medications. But predominantly I think it's important to look after and care for the people for whom dementia is inevitable, for whom it causes day-to-day confusion and isolation. And to help their families cope with these issues too.

Here is my justgiving page.