One evening I just felt like going for a run. I’d never really run before…

“I was 32, just after we lost a baby. It was at the time when there was a lot of stress running the café, and I was almost burning out… One evening I just felt like going for a run. I’d never really run before. I was actually one of those people who would look at runners as though they were weird and that running was a very boring activity. But that first run gave me a tiny glimpse of headspace, when I didn’t have to check my phone and I was not surrounded by distractions. Later, I started to run longer distances and I would solve problems in my head and have new ideas that I would have never had otherwise. A friend of mine, and a friend of his, joined me and we joked a lot that we run slowly, but we don’t stop. We ran 10k for the first time and then 20k and then we started to get really into it. I discovered that you can actually run down to Galway from here along the canal. I figured we could do it in four days if we ran a marathon distance each day. I had never ran that kind of distance before and we were going to do it four day in a row, but I had another friend rent a camper van and follow us. So the three of us ran from Dublin to Galway. We ran 6-7 hours a day. We were completely exhausted and our feet were destroyed in the end, but I will never forget running on this elevated path through the boglands. You could see for miles all around, it was beautifully sunny and the birds were flying around and our steps were in perfect sync, it sounded like a metronome and for a good two hours and we didn’t say a word. For those two hours we were not running, we were just floating forward… We all noticed but it was only after we finished we were like, ‘Did you feel that too??’ It was unbelievable and so beautifully simple… I’ll never forget it… So, go out and run! It’s not boring at all!”