I have been running every day since the start of 2020 and today I realised that yesterday was my 1000th run.

In honour of that I share a quote I love from a book that my daughter recommended to me called The End of the World Running Club by Adrian J Walker. It’s something I believe applies far beyond running. Enjoy.

“You want to know how it feels to run thirty miles. You want to know how it feels to run thirty miles straight through mud and across scorched earth, dodging sinkholes and crawling beneath toppled trees, when you’ve already run the length of the country, when your ankle’s sprained, your fingers are broken, you’re blind in one eye and you’ve only had half a tin of baked beans for breakfast.

I’ll tell you. It starts like every other run. Before the first step, before the first muscle twitches, before the first neuron fires, there comes a choice: stand still or move. You choose the right option. Then you repeat that choice 100,000 times.

You don’t run thirty miles, you run a single step many times over. That’s all running is; that’s all anything is. If there’s somewhere you need to be, somewhere you need to get to, or if you need to change or move away from where or what you are, then that’s all it takes. A hundred thousand simple decisions, each one made correctly. You don’t have to think about the distance or the destination or about how far you’ve come or how far you have to go. You just have to think about what’s in front of you and how you’re going to move it behind you.”