The Flamingo Diaries Lisa Jackson says ‘run as you please’
Well, it’s a valiant attempt at writing,’ said the editor at our weekly staff meeting, ‘but I’m going to give it to someone else to rewrite.’ I wish I could’ve believed then what I do now – that failure is feedback – but, aged 21, receiving this criticism of my first magazine article, I felt humiliated. I’d got 100 per cent for creative writing at school, so this knockback in front of my colleagues crushed me. I sobbed all through my lunch break – and didn’t write for a decade. And then it happened again. When I finally plucked up the courage to ask a different editor if I could start writing in the magazine for which I’d been copyediting for several years, she rejected the idea with a ‘Don’t even go there.’
That could’ve been that, but it wasn’t, because running came to the rescue. A colleague invited me to a charity 5K, where it dawned on me that running didn’t have to be competitive, but, instead, could be collaborative. And that furnished me with the ‘permission slip’ I needed to enter the Great North Run. Giddy from the awesome atmosphere, the seed was sown that I could, just maybe, run a marathon. Only six months later I found myself dressed as a fairy in Greenwich Park. I was astounded by my cheek: here was I, the slowest runner I’d ever met, allowing myself to do something I wasn’t remotely ‘qualified’ to do: line up for the world-famous London Marathon and have a crack at beating the elites if I felt like it.
Joyce Chepchumba, the eventual winner, had nothing to fear, as I finished in a shade under seven hours, but that experience turned me into a serial permission-slip issuer. I gave myself the go-ahead to not only run over 100 more marathons but to write the running books I’d always longed to have published: Running Made Easy, my book about walk-running, sold over 110,000 copies; my second, Your Pace or Mine?, won a Running Award. I also retrained as a clinical hypnotherapist, and my job is the most rewarding I’ve ever had. Running gave me the guts and the confidence to, as American philosopher Henry David Thoreau put it, ‘go confidently in the direction of [my] dreams’.
Now, over two decades on from my first ‘go-for-it’ decision, it saddens me that so many people I meet are still obeying invisible rules that tell them they can’t do things, rules that say ‘You’re too fat/unfit/old/slow to run’ They’re waiting for someone else to give them the green light. Numerous readers have emailed me to say how grateful they are that my books have ‘legitimised’ walk breaks and running at the speed of chat. They thank me for ‘giving them permission’ not to take their running too seriously and instead embrace it for the fun and life-affirming activity it is.
I’m pleased my books have the power to bestow such blessings, but these emails make me smile. Because the one thing everyone ought to know is that you don’t need anyone else’s approval to do amazing things in life, only your own. Why not find your inner rebel – if she or he likes wearing funky, smiley-face running tights, so much the better – and tear down the barriers of your own making? Why not become a have-a-go hero and enter the event or smash the target time the ‘experts’ say is beyond your reach?
And if you run on your own terms, you may find something miraculous happens: the other invisible rules in your life will start evaporating, too. You’ll begin to not only amass an impressive bling haul and equally impressive collection of running friends, but maybe you’ll also extricate yourself from that unsupportive relationship or unfulfilling job that’s sucking the joy from your days. You’ll start living what Thoreau called ‘the life you have imagined’ – and what a wonderful life that will be.