Was It All Worth It?

Last year around this time I wrote about getting back into my fitness. Well, the past year didn’t quite go to plan.

I’d written about taking it easier, recognising I’m getting older, that recovery takes a bit longer, that I needed to ease myself in rather than launch back in at full tilt. Then life took over. My routine became one that didn’t support any of that and gradually, without any single dramatic moment, I stumbled. No big fall. Just a slow drift away from something I’d intended to do.

Recently though I decided to go again. I’ve made another start at running. The aspirations will need adjusting. I’ve let things dwindle over the last couple of years and I need to be honest with myself about that. It’s not just the fitness either – it’s the mental clarity that comes with it, that particular feeling of having done something good for yourself before the day has properly started.

It’s going to take time to get back to where I want to be. Whether that’ll ever be where I was at my finest, I don’t know. Time will tell. But will I give up? No way.

I’ve had a few realisations on these last couple of runs that I’ll come to in a moment.

First though, I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself on the homeward stretch yesterday when an old Queen song came on. Not one of their well-known ones, but one I like: Was All It Worth It? Some of the lyrics jumped out at me — “yes it was a worthwhile experience” — and I couldn’t help but relate them to the run itself. Was it all worth it? It felt like it. I was tired, but I was energised too. Happy that I’d gone out, full of a kind of quiet focus. So yeah, it was a worthwhile experience.

Two other things caught my attention out there.
The first was a couple I passed, walking briskly. I may be wrong about the details, maybe I was reading it all wrong, but their whole demeanour said stressed, rushing, looking for something. Everything about them was wound tight. Their heads were down, their pace was urgent, and there was a kind of frantic quality to how they were scanning the ground around them.

And it struck me that being in that state is probably the worst way to find anything. When we get caught up in our thinking like that, the breathing quickens, the focus narrows and something closes off. We become acutely tuned in but to the wrong thing. We stop being able to see, really see. The very urgency that feels like it should help ends up working against us. What tends to help, in my experience anyway, not that I’ve perfected this, is to slow right down, take a few slow deep breaths, and actively try to relax the body. It takes the sting out of it somehow. Lets things open back up. The thing you were looking for has a better chance of appearing when you’re not gripping quite so hard for it.

The second thing happened as I turned at the halfway point. I was greeted by a bright blue sky with a few wispy clouds moving through it. Behind me, on the other side of the horizon, darker skies were building. The contrast was striking – this clean open blue in one direction and these heavy, brooding clouds in the other.

And I was reminded, standing there catching my breath, how much life is like that. There will always be cloudy times, stormy times. Patches where things feel heavy and the light seems to have gone somewhere you can’t quite locate. But like the clouds in the sky, they pass. They always pass. And what’s always there, even when we can’t see it, is that open blue.

I didn’t set out on that run expecting to think about any of this. I just needed to get out, get moving, and do the thing I’d been putting off. But that’s often how it goes. You show up for one reason and come back with something else entirely.

So was it all worth it?
Yes, it was a worthwhile experience.