I’m very fortunate to make a living working with amazing people.  Sometimes people tell me I inspire them, but every day I get take enormous inspiration from people around me.

One of these people, my amazing coaching client Super J, had a disastrous half marathon a few weeks back and, well, I’ll let her tell you her story.

If you’ve ever had a running injury this will blow you away.  Over to Jasmine…

“I wish you a very good journey; to an unknown you’ve never seen”

– Pieter V Admiraal

I have always seen myself as a mentally strong person, and I proved this to be true when in 2010 I was pulled from a race and taken to A&E. I was pulled from that race; I didn’t stop, I didn’t pass out, I didn’t even throw up – I had ran so focused on finishing that someone else had to point out my body was giving up.

Mentally I was already at the finish line.

Physically I was on a stretcher turning blue.  So on that day I leant two things;

1) I had a strong mental ability to fight through

2) I knew nothing about my body.

However, for some strange reason I felt excited by that revelation. I fought against the thought of failure because this didn’t feel like failing at all, it kind of felt like learning.

It was like that Thomas Edison quote: “I have not failed, I have just found 10,000 ways that don’t work”. Something had obviously not worked, and I had banked my first experience of it in the process, so from there questions formed about how this wonderful machine called the human body worked, more specifically mine.

I asked myself; if mentally I could push myself to the limit like that, what could I achieve if I actually had a clue. And so began my journey.

Two years later and its April 1st 2012. I am standing and waiting for the Reading Half Marathon to start. This race had become a huge focus – the heart of my new and improved training schedule thanks to George Anderson, my coach for the last 5 months.

This race, although an agreed stepping stone to the bigger picture, had been the topic of our conversations and the highlight of my training calendar since we joined forces, and now here I was. The day had finally come, and I had progress to prove.

As I shook out my legs and arms, waiting for the starting gun I focused myself on the task ahead, I knew how to run this race. I also knew my left ankle wasn’t quite 100% right but no problem.

I had already experienced injury before, this wasn’t injury, this would no doubt be a slight inconvenience, a pebble in my shoe and that was a battle I was prepared to fight. I breathed a long deep breath out, and we were off.

Now, when I returned home that day from this race and I was asked how it went, my reply was simple, “it was a bit of a disaster”.

My other chosen response, depending on how much pain I was in and when you spoke to me, was, “it was a complete and utter disaster”.

However, the truth is, if I had let honesty speak out, my response would have been, “It wasn’t what I was hoping, but it was everything I had been training for”.

The battle that day required more mental focus and more strength than I had ever needed to use before, and not in the way I would have expected.

At just over half way the ankle which had been a pebble in my shoe was now a thorn in my side and before long a blaring siren in my ear drums. It was telling me to stop, that all was not right, that the pain was real.

But it didn’t understand, this is my day, this is the day I have been waiting for and this has to happen now. But no matter how hard I tried to rally the components of my body together, it had in unison decided enough was enough and my battle to reach my goal was falling away from me.

The people I had been running alongside for 7 miles were pulling away, and yet I still fought on for another half a mile before I finally accepted its persistence.

I stopped.

I stopped and I walked with my head down, and I cried at what I’d said goodbye to. I couldn’t believe it. I had failed.

Those hours of training, those horrid winter months, my fighting spirit to never give up was irrelevant. I was no compliment to my coach, my mother would now never understand why I insist on this sport, and worse still I was completely alone, over 5 miles from the finish and in awful pain.

I was injured. What I needed now was a lift back to the start, a hug and for someone to wipe the day away, not spectators cheering me on, no doubt thinking I had under-estimated how far 13.1 miles was. ‘You can do it!” some shouted, “keep going!”.

I had the energy, the muscles in my legs, I had plenty of will I wanted to tell them, but no one was able to understand my uncontrollable tears.

The bizarre loneliness of that walk in the midst of the crowd and in the belly of the noise actually brought something to light though.

This here was actually a very real challenge, this – if I could comprehend it – was a strength training exercise opportunity, and this was the perfect day for it. This would not be a day about fast times or high fives anymore but about testing the belief I had in myself.

I looked down at a band hanging around my wrist.

I was wearing the white hospital band I’d been tagged with at A&E, that day back in 2010.

I’d worn it as a reminder that I was not at the beginning anymore, I was an experienced runner with something called intelligence on my side; I didn’t need anyone to pull me from the race this time. In black marker pen over the top I had added the words

SUPER J BELIEVE.

BELIEVE I had written. Why had I written that? Maybe because I had to believe that I was still on the path to being the person I wanted to be.

This was not going to beat me, or stop me, if anything this was going to be another great lesson. Not a failure, just another example of how not to run a great half marathon. I started jogging and stopped crying and resolved a few things; Firstly I was going to finish the race, I wasn’t going to kill myself doing it, but I was going to finish it, I had to.

Secondly, I was going to ignore all the runners now running past me and not think about what was.

Time had to be forgotten, and that was the only way I was going to finish this intelligently without going home in an ambulance.

Thirdly, I was going to come out of this stronger, I promised myself that, because what do you do when hope is gone? You fight to get it back and you believe that you can do it.

I learnt 3 things about myself that day,

1) I have an even stronger mental ability to push through than ever before

2) something is wrong with my ankle

3) I still have more to learn, and that could still be seen as exciting thing.

I limped to that finish line a fairly emotional wreck, and was an even more emotional wreck a couple hours later when I was finding it a hard task to even make it to the bathroom. But herein lays my challenge – it only started at the race.

The real fight is here and now.

My name is SUPER J, my aim is to run a 1:30 Half Marathon but more importantly to be the best I can be, not perfect or better than you, but to know what its like to reach above the limitations I once had on myself and be sculpted from its ever changing, ever challenging long winding journey.

May the battle commence…

Jasmine “Super J” Aras