The benefits of my 10ks will last long after I cross that final finishing line
It was on the third day of my challenge, as I lay sprawled on the ground in Richmond Park, that I wondered if I had bitten off more than I could chew. To recap: I recently decided to do ten 10ks in 10 days, to raise money for the peer support organisation Mental Health Mates, and to show that exercise is for everyone. Each day, I had lined up a different person to join me – by this stage, I had guided a blind doctor called Amit Patel around Greenwich Park, and the day before that, I had run with Emma Campbell, a secondary breast cancer sufferer who has found that running is key to her mental wellbeing – but now, barely two kilometres into that day’s 10k, I had been felled by a hidden tree root and gone flying to the ground, my ankle at an odd angle, and my leggings ripped at the knee.
Above me stood my friend Fearne Cotton, looking a little worried. “Are you OK, Bryony?” she asked, reaching to pick me up. Blood streamed down my right leg. My ankle throbbed. “I’m fine!” I lied, cheerily. “I’ve injured nothing more than my pride!” We carried on. The pain seemed to go away. Several ice packs later, I woke the next morning with an angry bruise on my ankle and the knowledge that I still had 70k to go.
“Is it really sensible to be doing that?” commented my husband as I laced up my trainers and prepared to leave the house.
“There’s nothing sensible about any of this,” I smiled. “That’s the point!”
Then I ran all the way to London Bridge, to appear on the Chris Evans Breakfast Show, and didn’t feel my ankle once.
It’s amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it – that’s the lesson I will take from this crazy challenge I have set myself. Last week I ran alongside David Weir, the legendary Paralympian, who got into wheelchair racing as a child so that he would have a sporting success story to match the tales of footballing glory his friends would tell. He was born with a damaged spinal chord that meant he was unable to use his legs – exercise, and wheelchair racing, in particular, allowed him to feel part of the world. A day later, I ran with Adele Roberts, a Radio 1 DJ who was diagnosed with bowel cancer last year. Her chemotherapy had left her hands and feet feeling extremely sore, but she told me that whether we ran, walked or crawled our 10k, “the main thing is getting out there and showing up!” This is the message
I am trying to spread with my 10 consecutive days of ten 10ks: exercise is for everyone, regardless of your shape, size or body experience, or the time it takes you to do it.
When you read this, I will be about to set off on my final 10k: the Vitality London 10,000, which starts and finishes by Buckingham Palace. I will be running with 1,000 other people in the Celebrate You wave – which I helped to create with the event organisers – for those who want to run for their head, rather than for a time. I think it is this notion of having to cover a distance at a certain pace that puts so many people off running, and transports them back to the horrors of the cross country at school. But I am here to tell you that exercise is not just for the fastest and the strongest – it is also for those who just want to be the happiest.
How to get started? Download a couch to 5k plan, and follow it to the letter – I find that having this structure also really helps with my mental health. Remember to stretch, and if you can, add in a weekly session of strength training. An app called Her Spirit has all sorts of exercise programmes on it, including Couch2kilos, which helps women of all abilities get into strength training. I got a personal trainer for six weeks – the excellent Hayley Fishwick at a local gym in London called On Your Marks – who came up with a plan to get me through my 10k challenge, and I honestly think it’s the reason I haven’t been completely destroyed by my turned ankle.
So my ankle may be a little bit bruised, and my knee scraped. But as I near the end of the challenge, my heart is full, and my head is euphoric. I have pushed myself out of my comfort zone, and the mental benefits of that will last long after I cross the finish line today. We are all capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for – and sometimes, we just need to take a leap of faith, or a tumble over a tree root, to see it.