Over the past 24 months, those of you who know me well have known that I’ve been particularly struggling with my inner demons. Churchill calls it his ‘black dog’. It is depression, and it monumentally sucks.

Given that I’ve been more unemployed than employed over the past year, I decided I’d start running. There have been plenty of studies that show a more active lifestyle can help alleviate depression. I started in July 2014, and now I have an AMAZING announcement to make:

Within the past year (i.e. 365 days), I’ve run over 1000km!! A whole megametre! I’ve run on 142 separate occasions (suffering painful stomach cramps in 5 of them) running 1001.94km over a total of 92 hours 38 minutes and 11 seconds of running time.

When I started running, my average pace was around 10:00 to 11:00 miles (6:15 to 6:50 per km) for the first few weeks, but that’s slowly improved and now I’m hovering around 8:30 per mile (5:20 per km). There are still bad runs where I get stomach cramps or have no energy or feel generally ill, and those do tend to be around 10:00 per mile, but they’re much rarer now than they were a year ago.

Also, my first run within the past 12 months was on 22 July 2014, so there’s time to increase the mileage of the year!

It’s taken quite some effort to keep going and, I can say this overall: It’s been bloody boring.

So here’s to the next 1000km…. (Actually, make that 1000m. Much more managable…)

(Bonus joke: Why do I drink from streams when jogging? Because it’s running water!)