When running habits

This Christmas, an annual tradition went totally off the rails. And I’m OK with it. I’m a person usually grounded in habits. If I start something and ingrain it as a habit – a daily, weekly, or annual practice – I stick with it.

So, yes, that’s probably why I run most days. Not because it’s a habit, as such. But because carrying out the (almost) daily ritual of running makes me feel everything is OK(ish) with the world.

One of the stranger traditions in our house is, when wrapping the Christmas presents each year, my wife and I will have the movie Castaway on in the background. I can’t remember exactly when or how it started but it’s the perfect movie to have on as a distraction from the annual nightmare of wrapping.

After you’ve seen it the first time, you don’t need to be watching every single frame intently to be carried along by the story: the narrative arc is time-honoured (our hero, played by Tom Hanks, is the perfect sympathetic character who encounters a complication when he is stranded on a deserted island, and the movie follows his efforts to overcome that complication). Once you’re into the meat of the movie there is virtually no dialogue you need to concentrate on.

And, so, for years, we’ve had it on as we cut paper, snip sellotape, and remember whose gift is whose. The only scene we stop for every time (spoiler alert) is when Wilson the volleyball floats out to sea. The drama!

Anyway, this year, for some inexplicable reason, we got to present-wrapping night and realised we didn’t have Castaway easily available. In a radical decision we went with Netflix’s alternative suggestion: Forrest Gump. (Cue running joke I’ve heard yelled at me hundreds of times – ‘‘run, Forrest, run!’’)

Anyway, it wasn’t Castaway, but the world didn’t end and the presents still got wrapped.

Sometimes running is like that, too. You’ve got your heart set on a goal and, for some reason, it doesn’t work out.

That might mean you’ve had to cancel before the race even begins – been there, done that, for injury reasons or family commitments.

Or it might mean you have to withdraw during the race itself –