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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.

My coach Greg put up a post the other day about an episode of his Coach2Coach podcast where he’d interviewed another coach, Julie Brown. At one point he asked her what her one message to listeners would be.

She said: “Every obstacle is an opportunity.”

The timing could not been better – that was exactly what I needed to hear that day.

We’d just got back from picking up a new car to replace our old one with something more suitable for our daughter to learn to drive in. It’s a lovely little car, but on the way home it started playing up.

Warning light on the dashboard.

Just f’ing great.

And almost instantly all the old familiar stuff bubbled up. The internal catastrophising. Weekend plans suddenly hanging in the balance. Thoughts speeding up. Breathing changing. That “get out of my way” feeling.

It felt like one more thing.

Another thing to deal with in a line of things that afternoon. We’d just spent a sizeable amount of money on it and hadn’t even made it home before something went wrong.

It’s not supposed to be like this, is it?

I felt really disheartened. Deflated. Despondent.

Come on, Patrick… where’s the opportunity in this?

I almost felt like I needed to find one just to pull myself out of whatever mood I’d fallen into. But I’m slowly noticing that doing more isn’t always the thing that helps.

I could feel myself getting caught up in familiar thinking. The old conditioned stuff that shows up when things don’t go to plan. Thoughts that seem incredibly real in the moment, even though they’re often painting a picture that’s far bigger and darker than what’s actually sitting in front of me.

I’m still figuring this out, but I’m noticing that sometimes the thing that helps most isn’t forcing a better thought or solving the problem immediately.

Sometimes it’s just letting things settle.

Doing something else.

Slowing down.

Breathing.

Then eventually the rushed, clouded thinking starts to clear on its own and what comes next seems easier to see.

In my case it was just looking into what the issue with the car might actually be. Thinking about what the next move was, and when. Maybe it was something to park over the long weekend and pick up again on Tuesday.A pity, but that’s life.

But Julie’s words really were the tonic I needed that day. Not because they magically changed anything about the car, but because they nudged me in a different direction.

I’m getting a little better at spotting these moments where I slip into familiar reactions. That space between something happening and everything that follows afterwards.

I’m noticing it more.

And maybe sometimes that’s enough.

So my daughter and a group of friends decided to take a quick trip to Barcelona.

The slow – although somehow still very quick – unfurling of the wings. Testing how far they can take her.

It’s been both testing and reassuring in equal measure. I’ve grown used to being right there when needed. Close by. Available. And now life seems to be doing what life does – we nurture, guide, support from close range for a while, and then, slowly, they begin to discover their own wings.

Or maybe trust their own wings.

And we have to learn to trust them too. Trust them, and trust whatever it is we’ve tried to pass on in those short early years that somehow felt long at the time.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about it these past few days.

She’s still so young.

Will they be OK? It’s a different country. What happens if she needs help? What if something goes wrong?

Then another thought comes in.

She’ll be fine. She’s with good friends. All the mums are in a group chat with them, which provides just enough reassurance without completely pretending we’re not all quietly checking our phones every five minutes.

Then her flight lands.

First message:

“Dad, my data isn’t working.”

My reaction?

Straight to self-judgement.

“You idiot. You were meant to sort this out before she left.”

Then the immediate justification arrives right behind it.

“Well, it was all hectic and rushed.”

And then, of course, dad mode.

“Right. Let’s fix this.”

Everyone else get out of my way, I’m on the case. Looking things up. Thinking through options. Heart rate slightly higher than necessary.

Breathe.

And again.

Wait.

How is she even sending me WhatsApps?

Hotspot off a friend.

Of course.

That’s my girl. Young, fresh thinking. Faced with a problem and immediately finding a solution without turning it into a drama.

And then, a little later, we realised the issue itself was nothing major anyway. Years ago we’d put a roaming block on her phone and simply forgotten it was there.

One small setting quietly sitting in the background.

I just couldn’t see it in the moment.

And suddenly I’m sat there wondering what exactly it was I was so worried about in the first place.

Anyway, I know there’ll be more days like this.

Breathe.

They’ve got this… and so do we!

We’ve all seen them – the “top button brigade”.

It’s that way of doing things where compliance quietly becomes the main thing. The only thing, sometimes.

In classrooms, it shows up in small but oddly loaded ways. A dress code where “smart” stops being about how someone looks overall and becomes about a single detail – a top button done up, even when the shirt doesn’t quite fit right, even when everything else looks fine.

And I find myself wondering what that actually teaches.

Because the message isn’t really about presentation. It’s about the rule itself. The “what” (looking smart) gets replaced by the “how” – follow the instruction exactly as written. No judgement. No interpretation. Just compliance.

And I don’t think that stays in the classroom.

As a youth rugby coach, I see echoes of it all the time.

Players who are technically good, sometimes really good, but something shifts when things become uncertain. The moment a law is breached they freeze. They look for the referee. They stop playing.

It’s like they’ve learned, in one part of life, that mistakes are something to be avoided at all costs… and then they carry that into a sport where mistakes are actually part of how the game works.

Where the game doesn’t really exist without them.

There’s a phrase I’ve come across before: the tension between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. And that feels quite close to what I’m noticing here, even if I don’t fully have the language for it.

It feels less like theory and more like something you can see playing out in real time.

Barry Schwartz talks about something similar when he writes about practical wisdom and the way systems can slowly replace judgement with rules when trust starts to fade.

I keep coming back to that idea. Because rules themselves aren’t the issue. It’s what happens when they become the only thing we’re allowed to rely on.

When judgement gets removed from the equation.

Schwartz calls it something like the “booby prize” of rules – this idea that when we stop trusting people to think, we replace thinking with checklists. Boxes to tick. Instructions to follow.

And it works on paper. You get consistency. You get control. You get predictability.

But something else gets lost in the process.

What you end up with, sometimes, is what I think of as a “jobsworth” mindset – people who can follow instructions exactly but struggle when the instructions don’t quite fit what’s in front of them.

And I see hints of that on the pitch too.

Not as a criticism of the players, more as something they’ve absorbed from elsewhere.

Playing the advantage

Rugby and sport in general offers a different model.

The advantage rule is one of the clearest examples of judgement in action. A law is broken, but the game doesn’t stop. The referee reads the situation and asks a different question: who benefits most if we let this continue?

It requires feel. Timing. Context. A kind of trust in what’s unfolding.

And the players who grow most in that environment are usually the ones who learn to stay in motion when things are unclear. They don’t collapse the moment something doesn’t go to plan.

They adapt.

They keep playing.

There’s something quite human in that. Something we sometimes lose when we move between systems that prefer certainty over judgement.

Reconciling two worlds

I don’t think this is about rejecting rules.

I believe in discipline. In structure. In small habits that create order. There’s something grounding about doing simple things consistently – like making your bed in the morning. Not because it’s morally significant, but because it sets a tone.

But there’s a difference between useful structure and rigid control.

Between something that supports judgement… and something that replaces it.

One feels like a foundation you can stand on.

The other starts to feel like a script you’re not allowed to step outside of.

And over time that shapes behaviour more than we probably realise.

People stop asking “what makes sense here?” and start asking “what am I allowed to do here?”

Those aren’t quite the same thing.

The “canny outlaw”

There’s another phrase I’ve come across: the “canny outlaw”.

It sits in an interesting space.

Not someone who breaks rules for the sake of it, but someone who can sense when a rule no longer serves the purpose it was designed for. Someone willing to bend, or step sideways, in service of a better outcome.

In sport, that might be a player who keeps the game alive when others have already stopped.

In life, it might be something quieter than that.

But I think there’s something in it we often miss when we focus too heavily on compliance.

Because if everything becomes about following the map exactly as it’s drawn, we lose the ability to respond when the map doesn’t match the terrain.

And it rarely does.

I keep coming back to that.

That maybe the real skill we’re trying to build isn’t perfect obedience or perfect rebellion – but something more nuanced.

Something closer to judgement.

Something closer to trust in your ability to see what’s needed in the moment, rather than what the rulebook says in theory.

And I’m not sure I’ve fully landed that thought yet.

It’s still moving around a bit.

Which is probably why it stays interesting.

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Where have you noticed, in sport or in life, that someone following the “rule” actually made it harder to do what was clearly the right thing in that moment?

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last post, and in that time life seems to have filled every available gap.

• Worthing 10s Girls Rugby Festival.
• End of season awards, BBQ and water fight.
• Plenty going on at work.

It’s been one of those stretches where you don’t really stop – you just move from one thing to the next. And somewhere in that I noticed I hadn’t written anything.

For a moment, I wondered… is that writer’s block?

But the more I sat with it the more it felt like something else entirely. Not a lack of ideas, but almost too much life to process in real time. No space yet to step back and make sense of it.

Because writing, at least for me, seems to come after the living. Not during.

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Something else I’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks is a shift in how I’m moving through life.

I’d say on the whole I’m more level-headed more often. That doesn’t mean I don’t still have moments where emotions rise up, because I certainly do. What’s different, though, is how quickly things settle again.

The swing back to centre feels quicker. Softer. Less dramatic.

And that’s new.

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I was listening to a recording from a coaching session by Jamie Smart the other day. He was sharing a story about the origins of the 12-step process.

I don’t remember the details exactly but the essence stuck with me.

The founder had spent weeks and months telling anyone who would listen that he had seen the light. He was trying to help others stop drinking but nothing seemed to land. Eventually, he became disheartened and said to his wife that no matter what he did, he couldn’t get these people to change.

Her response was simple – but it cut through everything.

“At least it’s helping you stay sober.”

That landed.

Because it points to something easy to overlook – that the things we share, teach or explore with others are often doing just as much work on us.

Sometimes more.

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I saw that play out in a very real way recently.

We were away camping and someone accidentally damaged a piece of our equipment. In the past that would have been enough to tip me over. Frustration, annoyance, maybe a bit of blame – all of it would have shown up quickly.

But something was different this time… I stayed calm.

Not through effort or restraint. It just didn’t escalate.

There was a quiet knowing in the background – that reacting wouldn’t fix the damage, wouldn’t help the situation and would probably make the other person feel worse than they already did.

So I carried on.

And we moved on.

No fuss, no fallout and everyone’s dignity intact.

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When I shared this in a coaching call earlier this week, my coach reflected something back to me that I hadn’t fully seen.

All the conversations.
All the reflections.
All the time spent exploring how our experience is created.

It’s doing something… even when I’m not consciously thinking about it.

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Maybe that’s the real takeaway from these past couple of weeks.

Not whether I’ve had time to write.

But what’s been quietly changing underneath it all.

Because if the work we’re doing – the thinking, the learning, the conversations – is showing up in moments like that…

Then something meaningful is happening.

Whether we’re writing about it yet or not.