I have come to understand there is something that is more of a challenge than getting fit – it’s how to be happy when you can’t.  

Trying to recover from plantar fasciitis

When I realised my plantar fasciitis was brought about by morning spurts around the park, I didn’t run for two months (I swam instead) in the hope that rest would get me better. This has worked to some extent but not completely.

So now I’m trying a different tack.  I’m doing exercises to help my heel every day and trying to ease myself back into running kilometre by gentle kilometre.

And doesn’t it feel good? Doesn’t it feel great to be out in my running shoes again? To be getting fitter rather than slobbier? To be toning-up rather than filling-out? To be moving in the direction of a solid, firm torso rather than a wobbly blob blancmanged at the end of the sofa?

Getting fit is easy – it’s resting that’s hard

And that is my point:  getting fit is the easy bit. All it requires is a bit of will-power. If we decide that is what we want to do, most of us can do it.

But my aspirations are deeper. I want to learn to be as happy when I am recovering from a running injury as I am when I am getting fitter.

I want to embrace the whole of life and life involves being tired, being ill, being old and being injured.

How to be happy when you are becoming a wobbly blob

Even if I were to run a marathon, what would I do when I had done it?  No one can’t get fitter indefinitely. The time has to come when I am becoming less strong and becoming what I (in my fear) perceive as a wobbly blob.

My challenge is this – to be happy when I’m moving in that direction too. Unless I can crack that,  I’m only living half a life – and the easy half at that.

A 5km run is said to be for families and beginners. But despite years of working out at the gym, I would feel defeated after running little more than half that distance. “How do other people do it?” I wondered. “I can’t carry on any more…”

It all changed last Saturday

That was until last Saturday, when it was such a glorious spring morning I decided that instead of working out in the gym, I’d go for a jog around Kings Heath Park.

I had already found out that a figure of eight in Kings Heath Park is 2km, so I decided to do one and a half circuits and call that my workout for the day.

I started off. The frost on the grass was glistening like pearls in the low-morning sunshine. The bare trees stood in sculptural silouettes against the clear blue sky.   Tiny varieties of daffodils and snowdrops were peeping shyly from the earth.  The birds were calling to each other, reminding me of other dawns I had witnessed, other times when I am overwhelmed by the sheer sensuality of being alive. I completed one lap.

Praying on the second circuit

On the second circuit, replete with voluptousness, I decided to pray. I remembered a baby I knew who was in hospital, for one loop of the eight.  I thought about the people of Japan, for the second.  Every time I glanced at the roofs of the Kings Heath terraced houses, I would think of the people who lived in them, whose names I didn’t know but whose neighbourhood I shared.

“I’ve just run 4km,” I realised as I finished the lap.  “How come I couldn’t run 4km on a treadmill? Isn’t that a great example of the connection between body and spirit? Doesn’t that just show the fallacy of thinking of the body as a fixed, physical entity?”

And with that, I thought I may as well do another 2km circuit – and I did.

(I also had an ankle injury and had to take my child out of nursery but that’s not the point of this post. The point is to find a way of smiling like a Buddhist cat amidst that particular frustration that could not have existed before the internet was invented.)

This is what I said to myself:

1) Don’t take it personally

Some of us (mainly women?) see a techy failure as evidence that we are stupid cows, which is the biggest block to finding a solution that there is. You are not stupid. You are a smart person trying to figure it out. That’s all.

2) Take baby steps

We could spend the rest of our lives learning about computers, servers, hosts, SEO, POP3 and HTML code and we still wouldn’t know everything there is to know. Feeling overwhelmed is another block in learning. Don’t try to learn everything or even a lot. Take baby steps. Take one a day. You’ll be canny before you know it.

3) Remember you are not alone

Mentally identify the people who can help you. There are probably more than you think. Share yourself between them, so you aren’t asking the same person all the time. It often helps to type your question into Google and see what comes up  – though you don’t want to know that when NOT BEING ABLE TO GET ON THE NET IS WHAT YOU DARN WELL CAN’T DO IN THE FIRST PLACE.

4) See this as an opportunity to learn

When something gets sorted out, make sure you understand what went wrong. Then you can congratulate yourself on having taken five baby steps before you even got to the end of the week.

5) Question why we expect it to be effort-free

If we see a beautiful garden, we appreciate people have spent years on their knees, breaking their backs and washing the soil from their fingernails. If folks are using technology in a nifty way, we just assume they’re clever geeks rather than imagine the thought, the times they were foxed and the hours spent watching little green bars move across a computer screen.

6) Enjoy the change of rhythm

There comes a point, when you are ill, when you have to abandon your plans for the day and accept you can’t do anything so you may as well enjoy spending time with your duvet. View technological failures in the same way. Accept you as can’t be as productive as you had planned so find something else to enjoy in the hiatus.

And with that wise advice to myself I wafted through my week on a jasmine-scented cloud….. That woman who lost it while on the phone to Virgin Media. It wasn’t me. Oh no.