OUTRUNNING THE DEMONS

Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and struggling to make sense of the horrific experience that almost cost him his life, Phil Hewitt found salvation in running, with every step slowly helping him to heal and become himself again. Here he explo

PAUL SHEPERD believes running saved him after depression, drugs and alcohol drove him to attempt to take his own life. I know this will be the way I will resolve what happened to me. I have set the Worcester Marathon a very specific task, a massive task, and I know the event will be equal to it: the marathon is going to move me on from the pavement in Cape Town where I have been stuck now for 15 months, convinced I am just about to breathe my last. Looking back, I was an idiot. And I do a lot of looking back. Except it doesn’t feel as if I am looking back. The past hasn’t become past yet, and that’s the trouble. It is an endlessly replaying present, and I am condemned to be its sole and reluctant viewer, a spectator at what seems, with every fresh viewing, ever more likely to be my own demise. It took a year for me to realise that my attacker probably didn’t have the slightest intention of killing me. He was a professional. A long slashing cut to the calf and a deep puncturing stab to the thigh; he knew what he was doing. I wasn’t going to get up in a hurry, but then he made doubly sure. He followed up the stabbing with a mini frenzy of kicking to stomach and ribs, back and neck as I lay there in my what-the-hell confusion. LOOKING BACK, looking sideways, looking whichever way I want, I was an idiot – and an idiot intent on compounding his own idiocy. It was 14 February, 2016. I had just watched England lose a one-day international at the Newlands Cricket Ground, a magnificent setting overlooked by Table Mountain and Devil’s Peak. Alex Hales scored a century and then so too did AB de Villiers in a relatively straightforward run chase. England lost, but so what? It was a fantastic day in a fantastic place. I’d recommend it to anyone.

But please, make proper arrangements for getting back. I didn’t, and that was mistake number one. I thought I’d easily find a taxi or a bus. When I didn’t, I started walking. Mistake number two. Before long, I was walking alone. Did I turn round? Mistake number three. Soon, I was walking on the hard shoulder of a busy motorway.

Did I turn back? Mistake number four. And so the mistakes piled up until I found myself walking through Cape Town’s District Six. The irony is that I suddenly knew where I was and could see central Cape Town on the horizon. The danger was that I was in a notoriously dodgy place: a

there, fleetingly alone, knowing that if I spoke, if I breathed, if I moved, I would burst into tears. My eyes filled, but thank goodness for surface tension. The tears didn’t tumble. I retreated, dignity more or less intact.

I knew what was wrong. Of course I did. I am a man. Men know these things. I booked an appointment with our practice nurse the next morning and told him my wounds were clearly infected and obviously weren’t healing properly. He inspected them thoroughly, told me they were fine and asked if I would consider ‘talking to someone’. It took a year for me to realise that I should. I am ‘talking to someone’ now, and it is helping.

But back then, less than a month after the attack, I fell back on a stubborn self-reliance that I have since learned to depend less on. I resolved to adopt my own two-point recovery plan. And I put it into practice the very next day. I started to write down everything that had happened to me, every last detail, every last thought, every last horror, every last indignity. And then I did what I have always done. I ran.

The broken ribs hurt like hell. The stab wounds throbbed appallingly as I pulled on barely healed flesh. I was wincing, I was hobbling, I was cursing, but I was mobile. It was a warm, earlyspring morning. The sky was blue – and so was the air around me as each step seemed to rip through me. But I started to smile.

There was something so reassuring about running, however badly, however lopsidedly. There was something so familiar, so welcoming and so absolutely me. Left-legged stabs and right-sided broken ribs aren’t a match made in heaven, and I was roughing them up as they met in the middle. But suddenly there seemed a purpose in the pain. Or maybe a message. It felt like my body was telling me, ‘I’m still here! You and I are still alive!’ The spring weather did the rest on a morning that was suddenly glorious.

Everything hurt, but I felt an immense lifting of my spirits. I know