Murphy’s Lore

Sam knows how lucky she is that she can run

Lately, when I find myself looking for excuses to miss or postpone a run, I hear the voice of my friend Jenny, telling me from her sickbed how much she wished she could be out there, running in the fresh air. ‘I just want to be able to do normal things again,’ she said.

Jenny died of cancer in May, just 50 years old. The shock of her absence is giving way to a sense of responsibility to really appreciate those ‘normal things’ that were denied her. Running, of course, was just one of them, but because it is the thread that wove our friendship together, it’s when I’m doing it – or thinking about doing it – that I most often think of her.

It’s natural to feel angry when you lose someone you care deeply about – to get bogged down in the injustice of it. But to miss the opportunity to look more closely at your own life and how you choose to live it would simply add to the sorrow.

So I’ve been trying not to take my running for granted, and to savour this ‘normal thing’ she and I shared. All of it – the Sunday-morning slogs, the punishing interval workouts and the madcap runs across fields with an over-energetic terrier. I chose to be a runner. It’s a choice you probably made, too, since you are reading this. And it’s a choice Jenny made. But we still get to make it every day. And that’s a privilege to be thankful for.

There’s been much research on the effects of gratitude. Dr Robert Emmons, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, has found that cultivating gratitude can have a lasting impact on physical and mental health. For example, keeping a gratitude diary for three weeks (in which you list the things you are grateful for each day) helped to increase subjects’ levels of optimism and joy, as well as increasing compassion and reducing pain. When we focus on the things we are thankful for, the parasympathetic part of the nervous system, associated with relaxation and calmness, is activated, which can lower cortisol levels (the stress hormone) and increase oxytocin (the bonding hormone).

That might explain why a 2016 study found that gratitude was associated with lower levels of anxiety and depression, and why people who rate higher on a scale of how often and how deeply they feel gratitude seem to have better coping strategies to weather tough times. ‘ I believe gratitude gives people a perspective from which they can interpret negative life events and helps them guard against post-traumatic stress and lasting anxiety,’ says Emmons.

Instead of a gratitude diary, I’ve been practising gratitude runs – thinking about all the good things that running has brought into my life: fun, friends, fitness, adventure, a sense of challenge, an appreciation of nature and a dogged determination to see things through, to name but a few. How lucky I am, I think to myself, that I get to do this. It’s subtly changing my experience of running. I feel more in the moment – more aware both of what’s around me and what’s within me. I can see that there is goodness in life without pretending that there isn’t also hardship and sorrow. As Emmons says, ‘Gratitude allows us to celebrate the present.’

It was a slow-burn love affair between Jenny and running. She started purely to raise money for charity and regularly shelved her running shoes between events. But, gradually, she became a regular runner, eventually clocking up five marathons and joining my weekly group sessions, at the end of which she would sometimes exclaim, in a tone of slight disbelief, ‘ I enjoyed that.’ Jenny often said how much I’d helped and inspired her with her running. Now, she is returning the favour. Thank you, Jen.