Exciting New Challenge

I've got some very exciting news to share with you all. Come July next year I will be taking part in Mind Hike, a 24 hour hike along the Offa's Dyke trail. This will see me walk 40 miles in one day, including crossing the English-Welsh border no less than 20 times! I'm sure it won't surprise you to hear that this is in aid of Mind, the mental health charity. I'm aiming to raise desperately needed funds to help them with their mission to make sure no one has to face mental illness alone.

But before I get on to more on that I should mention the fundraising I have done since my last post. Just over a week ago I ran 10k around London's Victoria Park. I did this dressed in a ridiculously over-sized felt santa suit which made for a very sweaty time. It made for a very unpleasant time, but did inspire you to support me with a total of £227 raised fro Sane, another mental health charity. Below you'll see the photo of me on the start line proving that I honestly have no shame (look on the far right)

Displaying my Sane T-shirt with pride

That was hopefully a good warm up for my main fundraising this coming year. I signed up for the Mind Hike a while ago and have very recently been told I've got a place which is a very exciting prospect. It'll see me hike through the night at the start of July, for a total of 40 miles walking.I've never been hiking at night, and 24 hours will be a long time to be on my feet. To put it in perspective, I'll be walking 1 1/2 marathons in one day, all of which will be on variable terrain. Basically, it's going to be tough. To see more about it click here.

But for me that's still not enough. I'm aiming to raise £2,000, and to mark my progress I'm promising to carry a weight on my trek for every £500 I raise. Each of these weights will represent a struggle that those suffering with depression carry with them everywhere, at all times. They will also be very personal and so expect to hear more about them in due course.

If you want to donate to my cause, you can do so here. Any amount will be incredibly gratefully received. It will all help to support Mind with their amazing work.

Whilst you digest the thought of what I have signed myself up for I'll take a quick break. But in the coming days I'll be back with a post about my latest 'fun' with my depression and all the studies and surveys that I've taken part in this term. 

Long time no see

First of all let me apologise for the fact that this post is about 9 months overdue. I got a bit caught up in many things and neglected to keep my blog up to date. But mostly let me say thank you to everyone who supported me on my endeavors this summer. With your support and donations I managed to raise a touch over £2,000 for Mind so THANK YOU, it'll make such a difference to so many people.

Anyway, I'll give a quick summary of the last 9 months. I completed a course in accounting and now have a certificate in it (woo), I also worked at an accounting firm and had a surprisingly good time (it's not as bad as everyone seems to think) though for now it's not for me. Hence it's handy that I finally got to go back to Cambridge and am now here doing a masters in Systems Biology (and before you ask I'm not sure anyone really knows what that means). But more importantly I cycled 99.5 miles around London and Surrey (unfortunately I had to walk some of Leith Hill owing to a a major accident on the day ahead of me). I also took part in the London Triathlon and generally worked hard to earn all the money I could for Mind. If you want to hear more about the details please do get in touch and I'll try to catch up with you when I have a bit more time.

On to the now (and hopefully this time I really will keep the blog up to date with at least monthly posts). I'm most of the way through my first term back at Cambridge, and as I feared might happen, I have slowly slid my way back 'into episode' as the doctors say. In normal English, my brain is being a pain and deciding to make a mountain out of everything I do day to day and so I'm officially depressed again. This time I've taken action sooner though so am still on top of things (I think). Hence I've now added mirtazapine to the list of chemicals I use to 'normalise' myself. So far the side effects aren't too bad, though spending most of my morning half asleep always helps with being productive. Still better the be half-productive than give up all together. If you are reading this and are worried, you don't need to be (too much), Cambridge is just a very intense place and my brain is trying to tell me what I already know, this environment isn't healthy, but it is manageable. Hopefully I'll write a post going into a bit more detail about what I mean when I say this in due course. Don't get me wrong though, I love Cambridge.

This brings me nicely onto the more positive side of things. Once again I'm doing something to help others who are struggling with their mental health. In a couple of weeks time I will be running 10km around London's Victoria Park dressed in a Santa suit and becoming very sweaty. All of this will be to raise money for the great charity Sane, so please do donate via my justgiving page if you can spare any money. What makes Sane so great is the amazing amount of support that they provide for those struggling with their mental health, or those who are caring for others. The sad fact is that Sane don't have the resources they need to help everyone they want to, so this is where we need to do what we can to help.

As it's currently a very busy part of term, I'll leave this post there for now, but I promise that I'll be back soon with more to talk about. In the meantime I'll hopefully give my blog a bit of a spring clean. Do keep your eyes peeled though, something very exciting is in the works and I will reveal all in a couple of weeks. In the meantime please do donate anything you can afford to Sane. Every pound can and will make a difference. Honestly it's the best gift you could give me this Christmas (well, I confess, probably the second best, a PhD place would be pretty nice too) If you can spare any money then you can donate via the link below.

Please sponsor me and make someone's Christmas better

It's Time to Talk (Possible Triggers)

Hi anyone who still checks in here. Sorry for the prolonged radio silence. I'll get to that in a bit. First of all I want to talk a little bit about a campaign that is running today. Many of you will have probably seen it through outlets like Facebook. I'm talking about the 'Time to Talk' Campaign. At the core of this campaign is the underlying need for society to talk more about mental health and to start to remove the stigma that surrounds it. 

Many people might prefer not to talk about mental health issues, believing that they'll never have to deal with them, but the fact is 1 in 4 of us will have a mental health issue at some point in our lives. And just because you don't have mental health worries yourself it does not mean that you won't have one affect your life. Mental illness doesn't just affect the person with the condition. Most sufferers will have loved-ones close to them who will form the basis of their support, and become the foundation around which many sufferers build their lives. Yet as it stands a large proportion of the population is still fairly unaware of the truth of mental illness, and many out-dated (and at times harmful) stereotypes are often bandied around in place of helpful awareness. Hopefully you are now seeing why it is 'Time To Talk'.

The 'Time to Talk' Campaign simply asks for people to take 5 minutes today to talk about mental health. This post is my contribution, but if anyone wants someone to talk to about mental health, as always, I'm more than happy to talk about my experience. The more we share experiences and knowledge, the better prepared we, as a society, will be to help people struggling with mental ill health. I don't think I can possibly overstate the power of talking in dealing with mental health. Often people suffering with mental health conditions feel isolated. Often they develop poor views of themselves and their self-esteem suffers. Unsurprisingly this leads to many sufferers becoming withdrawn and actively isolating themselves, feeling like they have nowhere to go or no-one to talk to. But many sufferers will tell you, a friendly face popping round, an old friend giving a call, or even just a 'how's things?' text can make a world of difference to someone in the midst of a battle with their brain chemistry.

So, on to my 5 minutes.

For those of you who know my story skip the next couple of paragraphs for my update, those of you know to this feel free to read on. This time last year I appeared (at least to outside observers) to be in a great place with the world being my oyster. I was at Cambridge studying maths, I was well on top of my work. I was rowing with the university lightweight rowing club and I had a reasonable chance to get one of the seats in the boat to race Oxford. I was fitter than I'd ever been. This all changed on the 11th March when I was hit off my bike by a car. I injured my shoulder. I couldn't row. Writing became hard. Yet still I seemed to have come out of it amazingly well and no one had any reason to believe there was an underlying problem.

Yet barely two months later you would have found me at home (when I should have been at College revising). I was brought home by  my parents when they realised how deep my depression had become and they were worried for my safety: what I might do to myself. This is what depression had done to me. To this day I'm still on medication to help keep it at bay, but that doesn't mean it hasn't shown up from time to time. Right now I'm on a year out as a result of under-performing in my exams last summer, but signs are good for me to return to study next year. In the mean time I've signed up to do Ride London and some other sporting events to raise money for Mind, the mental health charity. It probably doesn't surprise you that this is a cause close to my heart, but any help or support you can offer (there's a donation link on the right at the top) will be greatly appreciated.

MY UPDATE

So I've been away for a while, time for me to explain. I have been quite busy over the last few months and have been meaning to sit down at a PC when I got a chance to update this blog. So let me summarise what I have been up to.

Things I've done since my last blog post:

• Raced 10km cross-county
• Completed my first cycle sportive (all 120km of it, including my wrong turn...)
• Helped my college boat club by coaching on their training camp
• Started studying accountancy courses with the Open University
• Celebrated Christmas
• Turned 22

Things I haven't done since my last blog post:

• Much training (I could probably count the session with my fingers)
• Felt particularly great

So let me explain. I've struggled. My mental state hasn't been so great. Depression isn't an illness that can necessarily be solved with one course of medication or therapy. That's not to say that my state isn't better than it was last May. I'm in a much better place than I was then. But still, my condition has left me struggling for motivation and having to battle myself to get up and train. Now I might have taken part in more than my fair share of incredibly intensive training plans, but even then I had days where it felt like it took all my willpower to get into kit and go training. This is a feeling many of you can probably empathise with. My experience with depression is often like this, only rather than fighting myself to go training, my battleground is much more day-to-day. I find myself needing all my willpower to get out of bed, and the idea of showering seems more akin to trying to climb Everest than a standard minor feature of my day.

Now I think I should clarify, of late I (thankfully) haven't been quite as bad I have described above. I have however really really struggled to do much more than get by day to day. Typically I would find myself in front of the TV or buried in the A Song of Ice and Fire books (much better than the TV series IMHO) and I did a lot of comfort eating. A LOT. This is a surprisingly poorly known symptom of depression: overeating. This hasn't helped me in any way. Thinking back to this time last year I had pretty much the lowest body fat I could be healthy with, I was able to consider doing a 'casual' half-marathon with no planning should the feeling take me. Now I am 'Overweight' for the first time in my life, and running 8km (~1/3 of a half marathon) two days ago wiped me out. It's safe to say of late I've gone backwards a fair bit. But that is the way of depression.

What a lot of people will struggle to understand until they have suffered at the hands of depression is the internal battle that so many of us go through. I don't let myself get 'lazy' and out of shape willfully. Those who know me well will tell you I'm not often one to sit around much, and I am very proactive. What depression does is steal that away from me. My inner voice (me in my head) still tells me that I should be training, I shouldn't have that ice cream, I should go get an apple. The problem is that depression hi-jacks that side of me, it makes me question the point. It tells me not to bother because what difference will it make. This is the start of the slippery slope. As I start to slip into this period of inactivity I start to see my fitness and health get worse. My inner voice still tells me to get up and do something. But I don't because depression weighs down on me pinning me in to lethargy. So my inner voice (ie me) starts to shame me, telling me I'm lazy and pathetic and why am I not doing anything. My identity wrestles with my reality, I'm not lazy, that's not me, I'm just being pathetic. At least that's what my head says. Next thing I know I'm lost and confused. I keep hearing these negative thoughts, but I can't tell which ones are really me and which are the voice of my depression. This is what makes depression so crippling. It tears down my identity and leaves me with so many negative thoughts that I can't decipher from my reality. On my worst days in May I turned to alcohol and self-harm to quiet the maelstrom of negative thoughts in my head. These aren't the best ways of coping, but on the days where I really couldn't cope they kept me going. And at times that is what battling depression becomes, simply the battle to keep going. And boy is it tiring.

This is what depression does, it tears you apart from the inside, all the meanwhile leaving you looking normal from the outside. Keeping up this facade takes so much effort that you are left exhausted simply by existing. It breaks you down, and leaves you with nothing of 'you'. And it sure as hell is a lot harder to build an identity back up than it is to break one down. It's why it can become easier to slip back into depression than to climb back out. And so that is why I've been so quiet, because my depression has been snapping at my heels and I've been using my energy to break free.

On the positive side I've started to make a change. I'm slowly working my way back in to training. It's going to be a long slow slog uphill. But I've done it before and I'm determined to do it again. I've also started to diet, the 5:2 diet to be specific. I'll probably keep updates on here about how it goes. Hopefully with all my free time I'll be able to write some posts that are less narrative. I hope to write about my historic experience. I'd also like to write about some of the ways I visualise and deal with my depression. So you have been warned, watch this space.

I'd also like to take a moment to thank everyone that has supported me so far. Be it with donations or through getting in touch. It's really been quite humbling to have so many people reach out to offer their support and share their experiences. I wish I could have known all the friends and family that have been through similar experiences. One of the most powerful pieces of knowledge on my worst days was that I wasn't alone in my suffering. And no one should have to be, its going to take a huge cultural change, but it is past time we open up about mental health. I commend anyone who has the bravery to do so. Only by making it acceptable not to be okay can we help those who are struggling. It's Time to Talk.

Until next time (hopefully not too far away)

Jon

On to Week 5

Another Monday, another week begins. Having given my back a rest I thought I might try a short but sharp run. It wasn't bad at all if a bit short for where I'd hoped to be. The next day I went out with the dog again for a run. He always gives me good motivation to push on given how easily he beats me. A good hard run cross-country done and I feel a bit better about my training.

Come Wednesday I decided it was time to get back on the bike having taken a while away from it. I got a solid ride in (even if a touch slow). Being ill is always frustrating but I have to remember that it still shows for a while after in my performance.

Thursday and Friday were spent chasing around and running a few errands with my dad. As such I struggled to get useful training in (the early darkness doesn't help). We did have a lovely pub meal on the Thursday night though and I got a go at this lo-tech training bike (see below)

Come Saturday I was back home and able to get back on the bike. This time I took out Arya (my fixed-wheel bike). There are reasons why I might want to ride a fixed gear bike and as winter continues I will almost certainly get out on her more often. However, being foolish, I didn't give her a thorough service before setting off and paid the price later when it became clear I'd need to cut my session short to get her home. Lesson really driven home, always check your bike before riding (especially when she hasn't been out since July...)

On Sunday I had to help run a lot of errands and it was a very long day. By the time I was free to train my only real option was a turbo and I was far to knackered by then to ever consider that hell. I'll save that for a rainy day...

Until Next Time,

Jon

Week 4

So on to week 4 and getting back in to training (or that's what I had hoped). On Monday I felt pretty awful again. I had agreed to coach an early morning outing and so did just that. Cycling around and shouting in the cold really did nothing for my health and as soon as I got back to a bed I lay down and next thing I knew it was evening. Another day illness has stolen from me.  On Tuesday I felt a bit better so I went for a run.  A standard 8km, and it was surprisingly fast. I appear to be back on form; maybe I'm finally kicking this illness.

Or so I thought... Wednesday brought yet another round of feeling really quite awful. Lots of sleep and I managed to make it out to the Fireworks display Cambridge always run. A nice early night and maybe I'd start to feel better.

Come Thursday I started to feel a touch better. By the evening I even felt well enough to train again. This time it was back to an old nemesis of mine, the erg (rowing machine for those non-rowers). I certainly wasn't as fit as I was at my peak (quite far from it) but the damned things were still as awful as ever.

In my keenness at being better I made a rather gaping error in judgement. I agreed to row an early morning outing, on a side I'd never rowed before (well once when I was 15). (For non-rowers, since each person only has 1 oar it means you have to row on one side or the other, I'd stuck doggedly with the same side for 7 years...) It was surprisingly fun but pretty painful as the load was put through my weak, injured shoulder. D'oh! Also I do not miss 6 am alarm clocks. Why did I ever trial...

Anyway I found myself very sore for the weekend and this pain had done my back no good. As such I made the decision to take the weekend off lest I mangle my shoulder up again. Over the course of the weekend I went to London with my girlfriend to head to her home for a big bonfire that weekend. Unfortunately it was so rainy we just stayed in and watched movies. On the Sunday I went back home and went with my dad to Aldi to pick up a couple of useful things. Turns out they recently had cycling gear. I picked up a lot of decent stuff for extremely cheap prices. I have to say I was impressed. Also, since we'd been in London on the weekend we decided to visit the poppies at the Tower of London. It was a very moving exhibit, especially once we took the time to think about the numbers of people who died in terms of things we could grasp (class sizes at school, size of our year at college, size of the whole University of Cambridge...) It was powerful to think so many people our age had suffered so greatly. I would love to include a photo, but I was so moved I didn't think to take one (nor did it feel right in the circumstance with so many shouts of 'smile for a selfie'). Sorry about that, instead have a photo of a classic car we saw driving over London Bridge.


Until next we meet,

Jon

Another Event Entered

So exciting news; I've entered another event! This time it's a triathlon at the end of May. So this will (provisionally) be my first triathlon. I do have plans to enter more in the meantime but this is very likely to be my first open water triathlon.  I've entered a 'Super-Sprint' length race in Hyde Park which is part of the ITU World Triathlon Series.  It will be half the length of my triathlon in August but a good practice.

In fact this will be quite a special event for me. I've toyed with the idea of getting in to triathlon for many years, but some of you may wonder where my inspiration lies. I was first inspired to go for a triathlon watching the world's best triathletes competing in Hyde Park on the TV. I've always dreamed of swimming in the Serpentine before cycling and running around Hyde Park.  There aren't many settings better than this for a maiden open water triathlon. In case it's not clear I'm really quite excited by the idea of this. Now to get back in to swimming. The event website is here. I'll be racing in the Super-Sprint event on the Sunday (31/05).

Until next time,

Jon

Third Week of (some) Training

Unfortunately my illness refused to go away for quite a while so the first 3 days of this week were written off as I was too ill to train.  In the meantime I did help out at my old college boat club with a bit of relaxed pace coaching.  I also went on a bit of a spree of acquiring sports gear.  It's time to ramp this training up (as soon as I get well again).

New Swim Gear

New Running Shorts

By Thursday I started to feel like I might be bale to train again, but within half an hour of getting up I immediately felt worse again.  There is nothing more frustrating than not being able to train when ill, but I'll have to suck it up as training will only make things worse.  One thing did happen today. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't become slightly out of shape.  Well today I may have discovered quite how much since when I sat down at one point I might have possibly ripped my jeans (and then had the fun of seeing what happens when I pull the rip to open it right up). It's definitely time to get back in to shape.

Friday started much like the rest of the week had and I feared for yet another day lost to illness. However, by the afternoon I finally started to feel ready to run again. So being me and being far too keen to get back to training I jumped straight back in with a 10km run.  It was slow, but didn't feel awful.  But waking up on Saturday feeling worse than earlier in the week I realised it might have been wiser to ease back in to training. Ah well, another rest day it was.  (Oh and for those who wish to know my formal appeal was submitted on Friday and will be read this coming Friday. I'll talk about the outcome in due course)

Come Sunday and a decent amount of sleep I felt ready to get back into training. I was around Cambridge this weekend and jumped into a rowing outing at my old college boat club.  I haven't been in a boat since July so it was nice (if tiring) to row again.  Next week I'll have to get back in to more serious relevant training.

Until later,

Jon