Focus on hope keeps me living in the here and now
ACLEAR MRI scan is as scary as a scan showing growth sometimes. As I heard from my oncologist this week that my scans are looking great, I was very happy but at the same time already petrified about my next MRI in August.
It’s like you’re just waiting for the bad news one, this is our internal negative bias at play.
I live with hope that they will stay clear but after 10 years of scans I also live with a deep fear. I feel I am doing one big balancing act.
I have never run a world record, in fact I have never really held a world one.
I think we once rowed a world leading time but that was it.
But if you were going to break a world record, how would you imagine it?
For most of us it would be in front of a huge crowd, with people cheering you and pushing you.
The stadium erupting as if it was Usain Bolt’s 100m world record is probably how most athletes would see it.
To see the return of sport has been a welcome break from reality of what we all face.
However in our current covid19 sporting world things are far from the norm.
When the Diamond League returned in Oslo this week it was fitting it was tagged as the Impossible games.
It certainly showed some out the box thinking, running simultaneous competitions from around the world.
Renaud Lavillenie competed from his back garden.
The Olympic champion went head to head with Duplantis in the stadium whilst a Kenyan team were battling winds and rain from another empty stadium in Nairobi running against a Norwegian team.
You could argue it wasn’t fair, but for me it was just great to watch some sport and hopefully the start of what might be some kind of athletics season.
In a near empty stadium the cardboard crowd witnessed both European and World records fall in Oslo.
It transported me away from the news on other platforms and the helicopter hovering above my house filming the streets of London as tension builds around more protests.
As Norway’s Karsten Warholm settled into his blocks to run the 300m hurdles, there was no need for the stadium announcer to ask the crowd to be quiet.
There was no one on his outside to chase, just empty lanes either side.
However Warholm did not need any competition to smash the world record.
What the impossible games gave me was hope.
Some psychologists say optimism is naivety around believing that everything will be alright even when we know the reality of our situation is pretty bad.