RUNNING IN AND OUT OF CONTROL

Hey, I don't know what you do at the end of a rubbish day. I mean, we all have them, don't we? And we definitely all have our ways of coping. For me, it's running. Hello, run. I love just getting how and I put my music up really loud. And as my feet are pounding the ground, I can always feel the stress of the day or whatever it is, that's really worked me up, I can just feel it fading away. And for me, that's a really special place. I began running about five years ago and there was definitely some things that were completely out of control in my life that I was really struggling with. And running gave me this amazing place where I could just go, nobody needed me, and nobody had expectations and I could just go and just be myself. And it just felt so good that sort of surge of adrenaline and endorphins afterwards. And I get to just come outside and just enjoy being in the countryside. Now, what started out for me as maybe a five minute run became 10 minutes. Then I got a run keeper app and it became two K, three K, 4, 5 6, 7, 8. And I found that every night I was, I was pushing myself harder and harder. And I was really becoming in competition with myself to, to get better all the time, to do better, to achieve more, to run a higher gradient, to do my personal best. And I began to realise that the one thing I was using in my life to make me feel as if I had some control had actually completely spun out of control. And I think I did know that something wasn't right. But I remember the day that my knee went. And it was painful And it just went in the middle of a run. And I knew I'd done something serious. And when I went to see the specialist, he said to me that I would probably never run again. And I just remember in that time to just, I felt like I just lost the one thing that was helping me, I suppose, just, I don't know, keep level of feeling sane in my life. I'd lost my kind of escape route and it's really hard, isn't it? Because sometimes we adopt these ways of coping and they can really kind of end up not being that great for us. So I think all I really wanted to say to you today that because we all have these ways of coping, just really ask yourself, you know, when you've had a rubbish day, and like I said, we all have them. What do you do? How do you cope? You know, for some of you, it may be that you exercise, it may be that you eat, or you just, you relax or there's lots of different ways that we can cope. But secondly, I just want you to really ask yourself, and kind of examine yourself a little bit about the things that you're doing and if, first of all, if they've slightly got out of control. So maybe you're now over exercising, or you're overeating, or you're over drinking, or there's so many different ways that these sorts of things can spin out of our control. And just to really make sure that you're not a danger of sort of hurting yourself in any way. Thanks.