‘My biggest achievement wasn’t the running but the overcoming of my fears and the limits I had set’

Following cancer treatment and recovery I found that despite increasing my walking until I could do a few miles, my breathing still remained more caught than it had been pre-diagnosis. I noticed it most when I was going up a hill. In my wisdom I decided that if I took up jogging it would ultimately help my breathing and increase my fitness.

I downloaded the Couch to 5k app, found earplugs suitable for jogging, solved the problem of them falling out by wearing a headband, and so began my nine-week programme.

In the first week I was running for one minute and then walking and running again. For most of those minutes I thought only about how long a minute was. I was running and like a child thinking, are we there yet? Are we there yet? Or in my case, Is it finished yet?

When I had completed my three sessions for that week I knew I wasn’t ready to move on to the next level and I repeated the week. I felt I was ready to move to the next level when I was able to do what was required without obsessing about time.

When I reached the programme for the third week, I was shocked to realise that I had to increase from running for two minutes to running for three. I really struggled and raged that it was too big a jump. In one of the sessions I actually stopped running, thinking that I had inadvertently turned off the app and was running way over time. That wasn’t the case.

Once again I needed more time to consolidate my fitness before I could move to the next level. Thus, I progressed slowly.

However, I was amazed to find that I was actually getting fitter and more importantly my breathing was improving. Spurred on by this, I persisted.

The next major challenge was in week six of the programme. By then I could run for ten minutes twice with only a short walk between. The final run that week was for a full 25 minutes. I remember completing it. The app actually congratulates you on being a runner now.

I was so thrilled with myself. It felt like a real achievement. The next run was the same and went more easily as I was confident that I would be able to do it. Everything was fine until that evening. I got a pain in my chest. It turned out to be muscle inflammation brought on by gardening. Needless to say it gave me a fright.

A week or two later and fully recovered I dropped back to the two ten-minute runs. When I could once again do them easily I found that I was reluctant to do the 25-minute run. In my head were urban myths of people collapsing after running, having heart attacks, dying. I could feel how much I wanted to shy away from going any further. To counter-balance that I thought about Operation Transformation and how they encouraged the participants to walk and run.

Now when I ran I wasn’t thinking about time, I was wondering when, or if, I should move on to the 25-minute run.

Years ago when I worked in England I nursed a man, I will call him Paul, who ran a four-minute mile around the time that Roger Bannister did in 1954. At that time it was thought that it was impossible. I thought about Roger Bannister and Paul and what it had taken to break through that collective belief.

I thought about all of the seemingly impossible things that have been accomplished in the world. The belief that I couldn’t do it was in my mind. I was afraid. Was I going to settle here or was I going to complete the 25-minute run and become a runner?

I decided to create an interim step, so I ran for ten minutes, then ran through the three-minute walk and then ran the last ten minutes. I practiced this until I could do it easily and then, not so heroically, but more confidently and with less fear, I ran my 25 minutes.

When the app congratulated me this time that I was a runner it meant so much to me; not the distance or the time but the overcoming of fear and the persistence. I was sure that Paul would have been cheering. A few weeks later when I completed the Couch to 5k I felt that my biggest achievement wasn’t the running but rather the overcoming of my fears and the limits that I had set inside myself.

Evelyn Waugh, wrote: ‘If you argue for your limitations you get to keep them. But if you argue for your possibilities you get to create them.’ In a similar vein Richard Bach, author of Jonathon Livingstone Seagull, said: ‘Argue for your limitations and sure enough they’re yours.’ As someone who had written a book, I thought that book deals were something that happened to other people and in movies. I am glad to say that that limit is also gone.

What Lies Hidden by Fran McDonnell is published by Poolbeg Press and available now in paperback