I received my diagnosis of depression and anxiety a year ago.
This was not a surprise to me because I have lived with this weight around my neck for close to 12 years now, but it was only after it started affecting my actual work I went to seek an assessment. I have been in therapy for a few years on and off, to help you understand imagine my depression like an tide, there are periods where it's manageable and there are periods where it's bad for the lack of a better word.
This is necessary for background because one of the ways I seeked to fill that black hole which was and still is sucking the joy out of my life was to fill it with food which was dense in calories and low in satiety. Obviously a consequence of this is the obvious weight gain and self hatred.
Now armed with a diagnosis and a therapist who is patient enough to explain to me the reason for these cravings, I came away with an understanding of patterns I had already observed.
With a psychiatrist's prescription I gained access to some decent anti depressants which helped me see things with a little more clarity and it has been a slow journey to improve. To be fair the goal isn't to be perpetually medicated, because it's not sustainable and there are obvious side effects to being on anti depressants for a long time which I am not interested in talking about at this moment.
This preamble is necessary because I need you to understand that it was with this newfound chemical clarity I decided to get in the best shape or my life by the end of this year, and this is my progress so far. Since January I have lost 12 kgs which is light work no reaction, and the catalyst to that change was a video from a guy called find404 I connected with his struggle of being overweight and I saw something in his need to do something about it, and the narrative he created.
With that in mind, I did the only rational thing. I signed up for a 50K.
Signing up is the easy part, realising that now I have to train to run probably the most I have ever run since I was born is something I am still struggling with.
There are apps like strava and runna which help ease you into it so I'm not going to go into much detail about the plan because those apps can do a much better job.
What I want to talk about is the struggle and experience of running these super long distances when your cardio is absolute dog shit.
Most people who do any kind of martial arts which involve sparring with people who have equal or greater skill at some point have had to do the dreaded roadwork session. I can tell you with experience that roadwork uses very different mechanisms from the actual fights, so it's mostly useless for the cardio gas tank. It's kind of universally accepted even in the gym community that most guys hate the dreaded lower body day. It's for good reason, it sucks feeling sore on your calves and thighs.
So starting from zero involved basically starting by walking for a month. Mostly trying to cover 5K, just getting the body moving. After a bit my cardio health got better and I could sustain running for 5K without dying. Then the plan took over. It became regular to hit 10 or 12K every other week early on.
Honestly when you start hitting 15K you need to start considering a few things:
-
good shoes which have a large enough toe box to not give you blisters
-
clean compression socks
-
knee support
-
compression pants because chafing is a bitch
-
hydration bag/vest because one of the first hurdles is the thirst
-
Calorie Gel which you can eat while running for a quick energy boost
-
UV protection so sunglasses, sunscreen and a UV jacket
These things are enough to get you through your first half marathon.
Nobody prepares you for the lunacy that is running an ultra.
You start feeling the slog that comes when you start running such long distances when you finish the range of a half marathon, your feet hurt, toes blister and bleed when you start doing this semi-regularly. The pain radiates from your knees, and your thighs, glutes and calves feel like a hot needle is digging into it. Is it fun? No. So why do it?
To be honest I have been an advocate for pushing yourself to do stuff that is a little extreme or out of your comfort zone to test mostly the limits of your body. This is because at least for me it helps understand my will power and mental resilience. For those long distances when you're in that much pain the only thing keeping you going is will power.
I can help you understand how I experience my depression. It is having lenses welded on your eyes which reduces the overall happiness of any moment, and amplifies every single bad thing that happens even if it's not that bad. It is like having a speaker drilled into your head constantly criticizing every single thing I do, and telling me that I am not good enough for anything or anyone.
That feeling is persistent throughout my runs but here is an indescribable zen that I start to achieve when slowly my body moves to prove that voice wrong. That's why I took to this herculean labor in the first place. Pushing past my limits of pain made me realise how much I am capable of doing, even when some parts of me are not cooperating.
The mental aspects were revelatory, I started noticing that there is a part of me which is excited to go and achieve these runs because deep down I am proud of basically running little more than a half marathon every week or so. This part of me reminds me of the person I used to be before clinical depression.
There is also the other part of me, the part that is negotiating. The part that craves sleep, good food and not feel the emptiness. It's the part that tries to take over when I'm not hydrated enough, or when the strap of the bag carrying the water digs into my shoulder cutting off circulation. It's the part that cries out in pain when my knees hurt and my feet scream. Running such long distances made me realise that part of me that's negotiating the pain to stop is trying to protect me. It took me a while to realise that, and it'll take me a while and few more therapy sessions to accept it and it's function.
So that's why I am training for an ultra because I want to see and confront those parts of myself. Hopefully accept them for what they are.
Would I recommend this activity to anybody? Yes, because you don't have a lot to do when you start running for more than four hours except realise that your brain is a complicated thing and your personality has a lot of weird quirks which only come out when you're on a death march. Do it if you have nothing better to do on a weekend and want to burn 4 to 6 hours.