Yeah, I’m not about to bury the lede in a 3500+ word essay: I’m bisexual and demisexual. I also have ADD/ADHD.

Hold on to your hats, this is a long one.

As an adolescent I figured I was operating with the same default settings and assumptions of the rest of the world. While I was intelligent enough to know that there was a bit of variation in the world beyond the ‘man + woman + children + pets’ standard prevalent in the media, variation seemed kind of rare. Whenever I encountered people – either in person or via media – that didn’t fit the norm it felt like a significant occasion. I remember knowing that it was rude to do so, but really wanting to stare at people who didn’t fit the norm, almost examining them in scientific detail. Never in a negative manner, but more in awe. I thought they were magnificent, and I wanted to understand how to have the courage to be that magnificent too.

There are occasional moments I remember from my childhood where I recognised that I needed to imitate normal as much as possible. Either I felt like I would be safer if I appeared to fit in, or it would be an easier existence if I conformed. Whichever way, it was a performance. It was not me just honestly existing as me.

Mostly I’d push away the recognition of ‘not being normal’, slide close that mental compartment door and not deal with it. It was always there, that feeling of being separate from people, but it was usually something that I could dismiss. Maybe I was normal, but perhaps I was also just a bit anxious!

I was weird in primary school, but there I slowly evolved into my weird. When I started high school, I was weird from the get-go. I hadn’t moved on to the same high school as my primary school classmates; instead, I bussed to the public high school that hosted the academic extension program my older sister had been accepted into.

At orientation day I was immediately aware of my individualness. Most of the year seven students attending that day all wore the primary school uniforms of the local schools, or if they wore a different uniform, they were also enrolled in the academic extension program or the visual arts program. I fronted up as the only student from my primary school, not knowing the cliques and the common stories. I was in academic gen-pop, with a kind of middle ground intelligence, and just existed. I made a couple of acquaintances before I made any friends.

Academically I was simultaneously crap, reasonable, or brilliant. In retrospect, you could see that when something interested me, I’d be all in, and I’d be bloody good. If I wasn’t interested, I could get terrible grades. I would feel overwhelming guilt about those grades, but it wouldn’t make me more successful in my efforts. Sometimes it just took a while for a skill to stick, but there were also teachers who could successfully teach me, and teachers that never could. My year nine mathematics teacher was one of the latter. If I didn’t understand his explanation of a mathematical principle, then I was shit out of luck, because that was the only way he’d teach it. In mathematics I went from an A student to an F student just by moving to the next year group. Same school, same buildings, but year nine, not year 8.

At the time, no one else seemed to question it, so why would I? I remember going to the school year counsellor and asking them if I should move down to a less skilled mathematics class, but I don’t remember anything happening. I just dropped from an A to an F, and that was how it was. I never really regained the small amount of confidence I felt in mathematics after that, just assuming that I’d be crap at it, and let the guilt take root.

When I moved out of home, I took all my life paperwork with me. In amongst redundant superannuation correspondence and 15-year-old bank statements ready for destruction I found my school reports from primary and high school. I distinctly remember shredding them in an attempt to wipe the overwhelming shame I felt just by seeing them.

I can still tell you what those reports said though.

“Kelly needs to pay attention more in class.”

“Kelly shows promise but needs to apply herself more.”

“Kelly needs to focus on her own work and not that of her classmates.”

I’m sure that there were positive points made, but you never remember those, do you? Only the negative points burn into your psyche.

I was an avid reader from way back. As well as constantly reading fiction and the non-fiction related to whatever hyperfixation I had developed, I’d read daily newspapers, plus the weekly popular newspapers and news magazines. Regularly there would be a profile of someone who “struggled at school but thrived in business/ professional sports/ the creative arts”. It always gave me a bit of hope that while I might be a mediocre fuckup at school, I could potentially be the ‘successful despite’ person one day. I never thought I’d be famous with a profile published in the Saturday paper, but I’d at least become someone with a fulfilling career, with a house, a car, maybe even a pet.

The articles would recount a thirty, forty, or fifty-something adult who had a learning difficulty like dyslexia, or dyscalculia and would have benefited from special accommodations back when they were in school but never had a diagnosis until they were well into adulthood.

I knew that I didn’t have any of those difficulties. Those were actual difficulties.

I was just a regular kid, who was told by many a teacher that I wasn’t trying hard enough. That I didn’t have any discipline. That if I were honest with myself, I’d just buckle down, study hard and then I’d do better in the exams at the end of the year. And every time I happened to do really well in a subject, it was clearly because I had taken a teacher’s advice and finally applied myself.

When I was 45 it was confirmed that while I might not have suffered dyslexia or dyscalculia, I did have attention deficit disorder. ADD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as it’s also called, is a supply deficiency of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain. It’s not a moral failing; it’s insufficient brain chemicals.

Most of the kids who also had trouble in school alongside me probably also had ADHD. My ADHD was the inattentive type, and when I was a kid ADD/ADHD was predominantly only diagnosed in boys, particularly if they had the hyperactive type. It’s easier to diagnose a kid who cannot sit still as ADHD than to diagnose someone like me who perpetually had their face stuck in massive novels.

By the time I received my ADHD diagnosis I more understood why in childhood I’d felt awkwardly separate from other people. ADD/ADHD explained a bit of my weird in school, but it didn’t explain all of it. I wasn’t a particularly social kid. I was quiet, with a small, safe, friend group. I was less bullied at high school than primary, but there were always a few specific fellow students I would try and avoid. It wasn’t until Years 11 and 12, when high school attendance ceased to be compulsory that I really felt comfortable at school. Anyone who remained enrolled in school wanted to be there – or were continuing to suffer but had zero desire to upset their parents – and weren’t inclined to take their frustrations out on their fellow students.

During adolescence and early to mid-adulthood I never encountered in real life or depicted positively in media anyone who was openly bisexual. When bisexuality was depicted in media; literary or visual, it was rare, and the bisexual character was never in an easy, loving and long-lasting relationship, either straight or queer presenting.

Bisexual people were almost always: hypersexual people who were never going to have vanilla missionary sex, instead they’d be in a threesome within 15 minutes of meeting their partners or a participant in a hedonistic orgy. If a character was outwardly bisexual and not closeted, they were almost always also the villain. The bisexual male partner in a straight presenting relationship was almost guaranteed to be closeted, actively sleeping with at least one other man; and the loving but oblivious wife would carry on none the wiser, until she discovered she had a sexually transmitted disease. The most positive depiction of the bisexual would be the character that really was “lying to everyone and themselves; and were only saying they were bisexual because they were on the way to [accepting they were really] gay”.

In the mid to late 1990s, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras refused to accept bisexual people as members limiting their potential participation in the annual Mardi Gras parade. Considering Mardi Gras was one of the few queer events that was broadcast on Australian television, that there was deliberate action that prevented honest representation of actual bisexual people feels completely absurd.

At school if you presented any indication of ‘not being normal’ you were at risk in some form. Statistically there was absolutely a queer population in my primary school and high school, but I completely understand why no kid was openly queer during the early to mid-nineties at my relatively large Western Australian public high school. There, if someone called you gay it was intended as a slur. Weirdly, I never thought much of it, because if there was one thing I was certain of, it was that I wasn’t a lesbian. I mean: have you seen men? Damn.

That said, I didn’t really crush on people, not the way you’d read about or see in movies. To be honest, I always assumed “falling in lust with one look across a crowded dance floor” was a literary trope used by writers to progress a plot faster.

It was only in the last decade – well into my marriage – that I came across the concept of demisexuality. The description was the ‘difficulty in developing sexual attraction to someone without initially developing an emotional connection’. That definition described me far better than anything else. I had to consider someone interesting before I could even contemplate kissing them, let alone having sex.

The word demisexuality sat quietly with me for a fair while. Having a definition; a label, was sort of soothing. Even though I didn’t feel it necessary to vocally claim that label, knowing that while I wasn’t ‘default settings’ in heteronormative terms, I really was normal. Yes, I was an outlier, but there existed a definition that fit.

Sometime after, I was discussing books with a friend, and we got onto Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. I’d seen the blurb sometime around its initial release, borrowed the book from the library, but only managed about a chapter before I DNFed it. My friend recommended I try it again, and because our reading tastes are very similar, I did. She was right, and it was a delight, but there was one passage in the fifth chapter that made me stop and dissociate for a good five minutes. One of the two main characters, Alex, is processing his thoughts while he goes for a run, a DIY therapy technique that I had adopted quite regularly;

“...They’re rounding the corner for their eighth lap now, and he’s starting to see some flaws in his logic. Straight people, he thinks, probably don’t spend this much time convincing themselves they’re straight...”

Thoughts will percolate in my head, fermenting and ripening over time. I’ll go on and continue to live my life while something somewhere in my brain maps out ideas and concepts that I’ve had. At a quiet point it will push something to the front of my mind and present it. It’ll be a question, a clarification, a request for permission to forage around in a connected concept. One day it presented me with a newly completed puzzle I had been previously unaware of.

If you ever complete a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle, you start by assembling all the edge pieces, and then as you start to build onto those edge pieces you begin to match up random pieces that have the same colours; all the bits of blue sky, all the green lawn, the section of wall that is a slightly different shade of blue to the sky. The green of the trees vs the green of the hedgerow. There’s somehow always a puzzle piece of sky that you’re 100 percent sure is a piece of wall, and a piece that somehow has a splash of colour that for the life of you can’t be matched to the box picture. You scatter around the slowly assembling jigsaw those little clumps of two, three and four clicked together pieces while you match other pieces up and await the larger picture.

All my life I knew I was bisexual and simultaneously all my life I’d had no idea. I had always felt an immediate ease, comfort and sense of place being amongst queer people. The empathy I felt for queer characters in media was often far out of proportion to the amount of participation the queer character had in the story. I never understood the ease of my high school classmates in the girl’s locker room getting changed before and after PE; how could they be so casual and have in-depth conversations using full eye contact while we were all half naked changing clothes? I’d be awkwardly bowing my head, careful to not look at anyone in the change rooms until we were all fully dressed, while they’re all yapping away with zero embarrassment.

I absolutely had crushes on girls, but I never understood them as crushes. While there was definitely some hero worship in amongst those crushes, because I’d never felt that ‘hot and bothered’ about anyone, I assumed that they were all just me being awed. I was more recognizant of crushes on guys. I think my main criteria for guys was focused on whether they gave off a chill vibe, and that they felt like they would be safe people. I recently saw another demisexual describe their crushes more as friendship crushes. They didn’t think that someone was hot as hell, they thought that they were cool as hell. If they could be that person’s friend? Life goal achieved.

In 2004 the Liam Neeson film Kinsey was released. That was my first real introduction to the Kinsey scale developed in the 1940s by Albert Kinsey and his fellow researchers at the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University. It’s a rating system from zero to six, where zero is completely heterosexual and 6 is completely homosexual. The numbers 1 through 5 depict bisexuality with a nuance, moving from one as ‘predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual’ through three as ‘equally heterosexual and homosexual’, on to five being ‘predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual’. It has serious flaws related to its age, but it was still helpful to me in developing that initial understanding of my bisexuality. I understood that ‘normalcy’ or those default settings was that thin column of heterosexuality at the edge, and I was clearly not that. I probably floated between a 1 to on occasion up to 3 on the Kinsey scale.

When my subconscious surfaced the possibility that I might be bisexual, I both recognised the likelihood of the fact and also slightly dismissed that it was of any importance. I’ve been in a monogamous relationship with my husband since 2009 and married since 2011; my potential bisexuality seemed sort of irrelevant. As time went on, and my subconscious processed what my sexuality meant and how it had shaped me, I know I was affected. Around the same time, I moved to a new job and workplace after 15 years, and that change completely stripped away any comfort zone I had cultivated. Emotions started bubbling so violently under the surface, on occasion I was surprised that I managed to sound normal and not like I was about to burst into tears. I so desperately wanted to talk to my husband about it all, but I felt like it was an insurmountable task only fraught with danger, not potential relief. Time after time I would open my mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

My husband recognised that I was distressed and gently suggested that perhaps I should seek some psychotherapy. He has dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) since adolescence and has greatly benefitted from therapy and related treatments. The same night he suggested it, I Googled a psychotherapy practice a few hundred metres from my work, emailed them requesting that they place me with a psychologist “willing to call me on my shit”, as well as taking the first available appointment the next day to see my general practitioner for a Medicare Mental Health Plan referral as well.

At the start of my fourth therapy appointment, I told my psychologist that I’d come out as bisexual to my husband. Considering that I hadn’t mentioned that part of me to her by that point, she was mildly surprised. (My dad had suffered a pretty catastrophic fall at his home five days before therapy appointment number two, so we were kind of busy dealing with my having to activate the Powers of Attorney and Guardianship I held for my father, what his recovery in hospital looked like, the process of moving him directly from the high dependency unit in hospital to a general ward and then into aged care, and then working out how we were going to pay for said aged care while my sister and I arranged for his house to be sold. It wasn’t the funnest time in my life.)

My psychologist used a form of therapy called schema and had previously pointed out that I fitted the subjugation and self-sacrifice schemas. Being both pretty introspective and fairly decisive when it seemed necessary, I had been mentally cataloguing my life and correcting for those schemas where I could see an easy fix. Not voicing my whole truth to my husband was going to execute my marriage at some point and avoiding that certain death was worth the uncomfortable decision to come out to him.

In late August this year, ex-Australian Rules footballer Mitch Brown came out as bisexual. I have a vivid memory of being bent over my phone, scrolling Instagram and seeing this post of him saying “I played in the AFL for 10 years, and I’m a bisexual man.” I was kind of shocked. I was delighted, but shocked.

Statistically, bisexuals make up the majority of all LGBTQ+ people – indeed, the number of bisexual people outnumbers all others combined; that one through five on the Kinsey scale was nuanced for good reason. Outwardly however, your bisexuality is generally seen by others as either homosexuality or heterosexuality because of whom you love. If you’re a bisexual woman in a relationship with a cis or trans woman or a femme presenting non-binary person, you’re a lesbian. Conversely, if you’re in love with a cis or trans man, or a masculine presenting person, you’re deemed to be heterosexual. Bisexuality is never the assumption; the assumption is always one of the monosexualities. It’s called ‘bi erasure’, or ‘bi phobia’.

Logically, there were bound to be bisexuals other than Mitch Brown playing in the men’s AFL, but I imagine in that environment if you have that straight-presenting privilege, it would be easy to just let your sexuality lie quietly. No one needs to know, needs to be aware that at some point in your life you’ve probably looked at someone of the same gender as yourself, and felt so attracted to them you blushed while you felt your stomach drop to your knees.

That Mitch was brave enough to stand up and essentially say “Hey; I might be in a straight presenting relationship but I’m not remotely straight” just utterly floored me. Until that moment, I did not realise how much I needed someone out there like me. Someone who stood up and was willing to be The Bisexual Person in Australian Sports Media.

And that was the exact moment I realised neurodivergent representation was what kept me relatively sane and alive in adolescence. Because every instance when I had felt awkward and separate and slightly distressed, I had just chalked them up to my being the directionless lazy shit for brains that I’d internalised to be the truth. But I also knew to my bones that I would be OK – because I’d read the articles and profiles and watched the TV interviews – that there were millions of other people just like me out there, and they had also been overwhelmingly shithouse at school, and they had also unutterably fucked their mid-year exams and subsequently their end of year exams year on every fucking year, and they were now adults: alive, upright, earning a wage, and OK.

If my bisexuality hadn’t been subdued for most of my life through my demisexuality, I’m not sure that I would have survived high school in the 1990s as relatively unscathed as I did, and I can’t say I was wholly unscathed.

Society now seems to recognise more and more that while the historically Christian patriarchal heteronormativity might be the majority, it certainly isn’t the norm. There remains, however, pockets of ignorance and hate that perpetually burn like an underground coal mine fire. I imagine that if you feel you’re queer and stuck deep in that pocket of ignorance and hate, having someone Visibly Out There Somewhere giving you a modicum of hope is a strong pull towards survival.

Representation matters more than you realise, and sometimes it isn’t until you’re 47 years of age scrolling Instagram on a cold August day that you recognise how much it was necessary for you to have survived childhood.

It’s interesting; when I moved my online journal from LiveJournal to Blogger, and then from Blogger to Wordpress, each time I’ve culled my past posts. Unsurprisingly, I’ve started doing the same with this move. There’s the odd post that I’ve rethought and now I’m older I’m not seeing it as cringe as such, but I am seeing that I’ve grown up a bit.

I went to therapy in 2023, and as a part of that, I did some old school pen and paper journaling. It helped me solidify my thoughts, and process everything that came to the surface. There’s a fair bit to now transfer to online.

I’m inevitably going to write about being diagnosed ADHD at the age of 45, and the barnacles that diagnosis chipped off my soul. The revelation that is ADHD medication. My Dad’s slow deterioration from Parkinson’s and his eventual death. My becoming post menopausal at (probably) 43. Oh, and coming out to my husband as both demisexual and bisexual.

Yeah, it’s been a lot.

The basic premise of the podcast is essentially Desert Island Discs, except the discs are DVDs; and each film that the guest selects answers one of 12 questions, like: 

What’s the first film you ever saw? 

What’s the scariest film you ever saw? 

What’s the sexiest film you ever saw? 

What’s the film that made you laugh the most? 

What film is generally panned by everyone, but you can’t help but adore? 

That’s the general gist of it. It’s a bloody interesting podcast, and the guests have awesomely varied tastes, with fascinating reasons for their choices. At least once an episode I’ve had to google a movie and add it to my “ooh, I should watch that one day” list. Also, the responses to ‘sexiest film’ are hilarious; I’ve heard listed Top Gun Maverick, A Knight’s Tale, and Starship Troopers, amongst others. 

When I was a kid we didn’t tend to go to the cinema a lot. It was expensive, and we didn’t have a great deal of spare cash. I definitely remember us going to the Bentley Drive-In cinema at least once, on Albany Highway, next to the Pizza Hut restaurant we used to very occasionally visit. This was back in the days of dine-in Pizza Hut restaurants, and I remember when we would go and eat there, I’d sit at the table looking out the window at what was on the big screen across the road. When we actually attended the Drive-In, I was still pretty young – well under 10 at least. I remember Mum and Dad watching the movie from the front seats, my sister and I sort of watching from the back seat, but more likely I was entertaining myself, and probably falling asleep not too far into the movie. 

Back in 2002 I bailed on public library work and went to university to upgrade to librarianship qualifications. I was living off the generosity of my Mum and the government Austudy allowance during my first semester, and after I worked out that I was unlikely to completely fuck up at university, I leaned into my mild film nerdery and got a job working at Starland Video in Beaconsfield, one of the few remaining independent video stores in Perth. I know I drafted at least two uni essays on the back of old overdue video phone sheets during slow shifts. Vale Starland, you are missed. 

Starland specialised in festival and sci fi and had constructed some amazing shop decorations for the video release of so many movies; indeed, the entrance to the store was a life-sized Stargate that they’d created. The store thrived on a sense of humour; I remember one staffer regularly made very small but genius artistic license alterations to the covers of video cassettes. Behind the counter we had Nerf bow and arrows, that now I think of it, probably dated back to the days of the Braveheart video release and if they’d remained in their original packaging, probably very collectible Star Trek figurines. Captain Kirk and Dr Spock were normally posed in quite compromising positions.  

Honestly, the sci fi section was the stuff of dreams for people. We had every single sci fi TV series you could be possibly interested in. And those were never overdue long; it was like every customer respected the effort the store put into content acquisition, and refused to potentially disrupt any one else’s access. 

The adult section was a mirror tiled room that originally had a blonde wigged mannequin wearing a white Marilyn Monroe dress standing just inside. When someone walked near the room a sensor would switch a red light on outside, regular lights on inside, and a fan would gently blow the mannequin’s dress up, like the classic photo of Monroe above a subway grate. Except at some point, someone on staff had decided to protest the insinuation of Monroe as prostitute and swapped the mannequin out with a fibreglass lifesize model of the robot from The Day The Earth Stood Still, so when kids got bold and walked up to the adult section room, a robot in a flowing white dress would scare the shit out of them and they’d usually run off. If they didn’t run off, you’d just watch them on the CCTV until they got close then yell at them with the deepest voice that you could muster and then they’d leg it. I wasn’t a huge fan of loaning out the adult films, but I loathed checking them back in more. You always wanted to don gloves. And they were never rewound. 

Each staff member had a recommendation shelf; you could recommend ten films for people to watch and give reasons as to why. I always recommended people see All the President’s Men and then follow it up with the 1999 comedy Dick with Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst. It blew me away that I was sat tense and stressed watching All the President’s Men, concerned about the safety of Woodward and Bernstein, even though I was watching a movie that was based on a book that I’d already read, one that Woodward and Bernstein had both written when the Nixon Presidency was nearly over. Then the absurd joy of having people trust me and watch Dick as a follow-on because the entire film was shot as a delightful homage to All the President’s Men. I am pretty sure I also recommended the mockumentary Drop Dead Gorgeous. And probably Hairspray by John Waters, and Goldfinger. 

Inevitably we were encouraged to take home movies, both new releases and old, along with advance screener videos, where there were two movies on the same cassette, usually so diametrically opposed in genre that it was jarring. K-19 The Widowmaker, followed by Sorority Boys. You’d finish a closing shift, and need to wind down afterwards, so you’d take a movie home to watch, finally getting to bed at midnight.  

We were allowed to screen anything in store, as long as it was rated PG or lower. You would be horrified at what has been rated PG. So many of the early Bond movies were rated PG, and they ought to have been M 15+ at least. I remember nostalgically popping on Goldeneye and then having to sprint across the store to switch it off when Famke Janssen’s Xenia Onatopp started shagging the Ship Captain, squeezing him to death with her thighs. Pixar was a far safer choice.

Music allowed to be played instore was dictated by the rule “play whatever you wouldn’t mind your grandmother hearing”. Which in retrospect was risky, because the shop was run by fairly progressive staff, and I’m certain at least two of them had a grandmother who moshed, and would have been front and centre at a Rage Against The Machine show. 

Starland was how I finally ended up reading Lord of the Rings. I’d attempted to read The Hobbit countless times but was utterly bored to tears each time. I knew The Hobbit proceeded LOTR, so I thought I’d have to read it to understand LOTR. Finally, one day during my shift I had a copy of Fellowship of the Ring returned that wasn’t automatically reserved for another person, so I set it aside and decided if by the end of my shift no one had asked if there was a copy available, I’d borrow the video and watch it.  

The next day I was down the cinema to see The Two Towers, and before I headed home, I dropped into Kmart to buy $10 paperback copies of Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and Return of the King. 

I own all three LOTR movies in their extended edition DVDs. I still haven’t read the entirety of The Hobbit by the way. 

Nowadays I’m crap at getting to the cinema, and I’m almost worse at picking a movie to watch on a streaming service. I do that endless drag through a menu line and paralysed with indecision end up resorting to a movie I’ve already seen. I don’t know if it’s because I know precisely how long my attention span is that day – and most days it tops out at about 37 minutes – or whether it’s because I know what I need to feel and want to rely on something that I’ve already seen to provide that feeling. 

There are entire genres of film I tend to skip; there’s a few reasons why, but one of them is I don’t have enough down time to see everything I want to watch and read everything that I want to read. I have a list of movies that I want to watch at some point, and some were added to the list seven years ago and are still unseen. My DVD collection has a few discs that haven’t even had the cellophane removed. It’s OK, my Kobo eReader also has a sizeable collection of unread books that if stacked in paper form would be faintly embarrassing in size. 

(Yes, I have access to a few streaming services, but I still buy DVDs. Sometimes the movies leave all the screening services, and unless you have a copy on DVD, or have that moral flexibility to illegally download it you’ll never get to watch it again). 

The genre skipping dates back years though. I can count on one hand how many true horror movies I’ve seen, and even some intense thrillers get me a bit on edge. I can watch for days drama or comedy or espionage or a gentle mass murder slaughter set in a quaint English village but don’t give me a jump scare, unless it’s something like Shaun of the Dead. 

I am fairly sure that when I was young enough to register what was on the television, Mum and Dad had the classic talk with me; telling me that quite often, what I would see on the TV screen wasn’t real. Unless it was the news, or on the ABC, it was probably fiction, a story, and that I shouldn’t be worried about what I was seeing. I should understand that any of those feelings I was experiencing – fear, worry, sadness, or joy – were valid, the storytelling I was experiencing them through was not real.  

Unfortunately, I didn’t extrapolate this knowledge when Grandma took my sister and I to see a movie for the first time at a cinema, and apparently Grandma didn’t mention a thing either. 

I would have been four years of age. 

Grandma took us to see E.T. 

E. Fucking. T. 

Apparently I lost my shit when Drew Barrymore, a seven year old blonde haired child, similar looking, but a little bit older than me, walked into the garage to find a brown alien standing there. 

My only memory of that cinema visit is a single image, like a photograph in my brain. I am in the aisle of the cinema, the house lights are dim. I can see the right hand edge of the movie screen and the heavy velvet curtains alongside. My view is slightly blocked by something – an arm or hand I’m not sure. I don’t remember any sound. 

Mum said I had nightmares for years. I remember a shadow cast through a window at our house, it came from a street light shining through a tree next to the laundry door. In the shadow was a shape at the bottom of the window that four year old me saw as the head of E.T. Five year old me probably saw it as E.T. too. Maybe even six year old me. I could still envisage it when we moved from that house when I was 13. It no longer scared me, but I could still see it. 

I think that first visit to the cinema might have slightly scarred me for life. After the E.T. fiasco I suspect Mum and Dad both avoided showing me anything that might have been scary to a child, and who could blame them, having had to deal with that trauma? I was probably one of the few kids who having never seen it, discerned the plot of Star Wars : A New Hope partly via watching Spaceballs. I wasn’t coddled, I definitely saw movies beyond my age group: I was almost definitely one of the few kids in my school who could recite whole screeds of The Blues Brothers before I reached double figures. 

(By the way, I ended up seeing Star Wars : A New Hope for the first time, not on video, but at the cinema for a 25^th anniversary screening). 

I learned the lesson young, to avoid movies and TV shows that were potentially scary. I was a voracious reader; heck at the age of nine or ten I remember buying from the local newsagent a collection of novellas by Stephen King; Different Seasons. We had seen Stand By Me on video, and I remember seeing in the credits that it was based on a story by Stephen King called The Body. It was the third story in that novella collection, and I think I read that first. The Great Gretna Pie Eat scene was as good on paper as it was on screen. The first story in that collection was Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, and we all know how good that was on screen. The second story was Apt Pupil, and I wasn’t a fan, but that too ended up as a movie. I still hope for the fourth story in the collection, The Breathing Method, to be made into a movie – I want to see how they do the ending. 

But even though I’d read one Stephen King book I knew that I wasn’t prepared to read some of the others – I vividly remember seeing a copy of It on a neighbour’s bookshelf, pulling it out to see a picture of a clown looking up through a storm drain grate on the cover, and instantly knowing that this book was not for me. I know that E.T. is probably a delightful movie, but I don’t think I’ve seen it. I know I’ve seen bits when it has been on TV, in little snippets. I remember being at a neighbour’s house when I was a bit older. They put on E.T. and I think I bailed and went home. I knew I wasn’t prepared to go through that again.

The same for selecting a movie to watch; if I have a choice I’ll often go to the softer option. I did get braver as I got older, but I also got strategic. I borrowed Scream 2 from Starland – I had a Buffy the Vampire Slayer thing going, so I was watching a lot of the back catalogue of Sarah Michelle Gellar – and I watched it at two in the afternoon, and with the curtains open.  

I don’t think I’ll ever seek out the properly scary movies. I suspect there’s a certain amount of self-preservation in that. I recognised this when I went to start watching the second season of The Handmaid’s Tale. I’d seen the first season as it broadcast on SBS, and even bought the DVD. 

Come May the following year, the second season started broadcasting. I’d had to miss the first two episodes, so I watched it on catch-up. Midway through the second episode of the second season I realised I couldn’t continue to watch. It hurt my heart too much. And then it twigged; when I’d watched the first season, I was on anti-depressants. I had literally only just finished weaning myself off them the week prior to watching the second season. At that point in my life I needed neurochemical support to deal with the idea of Gilead. I ended up reading show recaps of each episode, because I was still invested in the story, but I couldn’t deal with that immersion. 

Listening to the podcast has kind of reignited that joy in cinema that I felt at Starland. It was a formative time in my life; I was at uni discovering my confidence, that I wasn’t utterly useless at education, and Starland helped encourage me to discover my creative spark too.

I met up with an Exercise Physiologist. It wasn’t great. I went for convenient location instead of subject specialist, so I ended up with a body builder guy instead of a runner. Which wouldn’t have been the worst thing, because I knew I needed to train, and probably with weights, so at least I knew my technique would be solid. Except he was:

a) regularly late to our appointments, and

b) instead of setting me up with a training plan, and having me reconnect with him every couple of months to measure development and improvement, expected me to train with him at RIDICULOUS cost every week.

So when I couldn’t rely on his scheduling, and he expected me to be happy twiddling my thumbs once a week while he finished working with his previous client, meaning my 60 minute appointment would take up at least 80 minutes of my time – because he’d inevitably run late with me too – I decided to gently part ways.

When I saw him again about two months later, he tried a type of bullying cajoling to go back to him that had my hackles rise.

So, plan aborted. For the moment.

I’m now training with a local coach, and I have a super convenient, delightful and delightfully evil physiotherapist, and that’ll do me for the time being.

Today I did my standard thing, and took some photos and details of what equipment is available at the gym. I am planning on seeing an exercise physiologist that runs for some development exercise programs. I feel like I’ve rehabbed my back and hip sufficiently and now we’re going for progress work.

In my accident prone past, I have seen physiotherapists that do not run, and I have not had a great experience, so that’s my selection criteria for all medical professionals to do with sports injuries, or anything that impacts on my ability to exercise. They need to do the thing that I do.

I’ve also made a list of qualities I’m looking for in an exercise plan, restrictions and guidelines that improve the chance of success.

Firstly, it has to avoid inflaming my foot issue (right foot, capsulitis, second toe). I think I’m on the home stretch with that, but I need to have that sorted before we get really stuck into anything else.

Secondly, I need to even out the strength and ability of each leg. I know that my weak side is my right side. I’ve been doing eccentric one legged squats and concentrating on not dropping my right hip, and that’s easier, but I know I have a hamstring strength discrepancy too. On that point, I want a personally measurable; almost KPI measurement for leg strength and discrepancies.

Which leads into my third goal; I need to work on the musculature that will improve my running form. I’m fed up with tripping up on trail, I need to lift my foot up higher, and I can do it, but it feels unnatural. I think the unnatural feeling is related to muscle weakness, so I want to work on that.

For more specific requirements; I know I’m much happier to do a set time of activity. I’ll be more keen doing something like 2 minute long continual exercises, instead of some arseing about with 4 by 7 sets with 60 second recovery. That just feels like wasting time.

I have a tabata timer on my phone which makes things like 10 times 15 second glute bridges easier, because I don’t have to count seconds and repeats, but I still want minimal stationary rest time. Sitting around in a gym annoys me. I don’t want to piss about.

I need to know how to do an exercise. When I can’t work out how I’m supposed to feel the exercise, I just won’t do it. Activity without obvious purpose is ignored.

The whole show needs to be a maximum of 45 to 60 minutes, in and out the gym door. By the end of that time frame I’m bored. Because I’m so close to the gym I’m not wasting time getting changed at the gym, so it’s not like we need to factor in driving and showering time.

I prefer to do my cardio outside. If you’re putting me on a treadmill then I want to know why. I will happily run in pissing rain and cold, don’t assume otherwise.

I have learnt that I generally prefer free weights over machines, but when it comes to something like abdominals and back extension, machines are more fun because the weights are far far heavier and I’m less likely to injure myself with a poor technique with a machine.

Lastly, I would like to do whatever routine regularly. I pay to access the gym, it’s literally around the corner from my apartment, I don’t mind going frequently. Once a week is nonsense. More is better.

I put out the marking cones for Anna before parkrun with Milly scooting alongside, so I’d had a mile warm-up, and then started out on parkrun. I didn’t look at my watch and just ran on feel, and my god the feel was ARSE. It felt like a whole lot of effort, a whole lot worse than running had felt like for a while.

My PB at Pioneer is 25:26, dating from September 2014 when I was training for Six Inch, and I sort of ignore its existence because it’s going to take a fair bit of effort to get back to that. So I didn’t really know what finish time I expected today.

I can honestly say I’ve been quicker at parkrun these past few months after I decided to take the attitude of “I will run Tuesday darkrun, Thursday from work, Saturday parkrun and Sunday long run. And if I don’t want to run, I’m still going to run.” (That said, tomorrow I’m volunteering at Masters Athletics so might only get 5km in). I realised I needed to start to make ‘not running to the schedule’ the exception rather than the rule.

Anyway, I know I’ve recovered almost completely from last month’s ear infection and this month’s chest infection (my resting heart rate is slowly getting back to normal), and my overall speed is getting back to pre-illness levels, but the effort this morning felt harder than normal.

I wasn’t entirely impressed with my time when I got to the finish, and it wasn’t until we were in Dome after parkrun that I looked at Strava and it said ‘trending faster’ for the Pioneer parkrun course. I scrolled through my past results and realised that the last time I was in the 27 minute range on that course was July last year, and prior to that was March 2015. So in retrospect, it was actually bloody good work. Hard work, but good.

We’ve been running at flat parkruns because Jez has got a training program and needs to hit specific pace targets for his runs, and Tony, his coach, plugs in a parkrun with a warmup and a cool down, but the paces required are more feasible on a flat course. Pioneer was a last night whim and while I’ve been going to Kings Park on the odd Thursday, I haven’t been doing anything like what you could call hill intervals.

Now I’m going to do more hill interval sessions on a Thursday evening, and so when I run Pioneer again next time, I’ll have done enough hills at effort to know what a solid effort feels like, and I won’t be stupidly, mildly disappointed at the finish line for no good reason.

I fail at Inbox Zero, but I regularly, actively try and keep it small enough to be manageable. Most of what is in my inbox is part of my to-do list. For advertising emails and mailing lists and media monitoring alerts I have automatic filing rules, and sorting rules, and most of the time I can just run my eye over the subject lines of the emails in my 15+ different folders, and hit delete on the entire lot in one fell swoop. However sometimes everything gets overwhelming, and it doesn’t matter how much I flag certain emails in my inbox as something I need to do, and delete emails that I’ve dealt with, it marches up to 1,000+ emails. Again.

I find this oddly stressful – my brain gets overly worried that I’ve missed something vital, despite the unlikeliness of that actually having happened. If I had missed something, it’s highly likely that the requester would have called me, emailed me again or come up to my desk and asked. Ah, irrational guilt. It’s so helpful.

But worry and stress is never logical, so when I reach that point, I do this, and I recommend you do it to:

• Sort your Outlook inbox by received date.

• Collapse the sorting so that the only expanded timeframe that is open is the Older category.

• Move everything in the Older category to a new folder. Any email that you still have to ‘immediately’ action is younger than this is, because if it was truly necessary then someone would have bugged you about it again by now.

Once you have done this, then:

• Sort the remaining emails in your inbox by sender, by size, by date received, whichever. You’ve instantly cut out a significant number of emails you need to deal with immediately. Revel in this fact.

• If you sort by name then you can batch delete all those Australian Financial Review daily emails. All those Book Depository emails. All those emails from Reception confirming your meeting room booking that you had not only already put in your calendar, but you’d already had the meeting.

• If you sort by size you can now delete or file in your workplace’s electronic document management system that whopping 30MB email with those images you don’t need any more because that brochure has been printed. You can deal with that 17MB scan in PDF format for the document you finished last month and had already sent to your client.

It’s all so much less overwhelming. And when your inbox is down to the things you actually need to do, you feel like you can keep it roughly in shape for a few months.

Now, what about those emails you threw in a folder? The reason why you put them in a folder is that now your problem won’t get bigger. It can’t get bigger. You can repeat what you did with your inbox, and delete or file the enormous emails, the advertising emails, the news provider emails, the “hey, it’s Friday night drinks” emails.

You don’t have to deal with all those emails immediately. Pick off 50 at a time. Say “I’ve got 20 minutes before that client comes for her meeting, I’m prepared for the meeting, so I’m going to spend 15 minutes clearing off some of those older emails.”

Because I also have a physical to-do list I have actually written down “650, 600, 550, 500…” and crossed off the numbers as I’ve taken the folder down to that number. It gives you a feeling of satisfaction; everyone loves crossing things off a to-do list.

Incremental decrease in size is still a decrease in size. Don’t let it overwhelm you.

My lower back hurt, but the issue was with tightness in my glutes, hips and quadratus lumborum.

My shins were sore, but the issue was with my rock solid calves.

My knees were sore, but the problem was with my rock solid quadriceps.

Way back in high school, when my patellas used to slide out of place, it was because of my strong iliotibial bands and weak adductors.

My hip wouldn’t stretch out, and it was because the psoas muscle on that side was way too tight.

I had a sore heel one day, and in an attempt to relieve it, I foam rolled my calves. The foam rolling didn’t feel like it was working and distracted, I kind of rolled around on the foam roller, up my leg until my butt was perched on the roller. Bam! I felt this pulse of pain fire down my leg, and slam right into my heel. With some judicious Googling, I worked out that I must have had a knot in my piriformis, and it was pressing into my sciatic nerve running down into my heel.

I don’t know a great deal about human anatomy, but I have worked out that muscles need to both contract and extend. If your calf muscle is tight, it’s going to impact on the functionality of the shin muscles, and vice versa.

I have a sequence of stretches that I do regularly, in an attempt to free up all the issues, and sometimes I swear it’s like the Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly song.

In order to stretch out my hips, I need to stretch my hamstrings. In order to really release my hamstrings, I need to release my hip flexors. To release my hip flexors I have to release my quadriceps, but to really stretch my quadriceps, I need to have freed up my hips. To free up my hips, my glutes have to be released too, but in order to release my glutes properly, my hips have to be loosened up.

I have pretty much the same issue with every muscle in my lower legs and feet too.

So I end up doing each stretch at least twice. Release the quadricep a bit, to enable the hip flexor to loosen, and then stretch the hamstring so that I can then get stuck into my hips and glutes, to enable me to release the hamstring more. Once that has happened, I can get the quadricep really stretched, and also get rid of that last bit of hip flexor tightness, which enables me to stretch my hips and glutes out again.

Whenever I’m not completely certain why something hurts or aches or just feels ‘off’, I just do the whole sequence, and go through the Yoga With Adriene Runners Yoga video a few times, and at some point, I’ll usually succeed in releasing the stuck point, and be back to normal.

When I’ve done all that, if I’m still knotted up, I’ll go and get a good remedial massage and see if that’s enough pressure to fix the issue. And if I’m still broken after all that, then I go to the physiotherapist, because if I can’t run or move or do exercise, then my brain breaks instead.

I need to apologise to North American users of portaloos. Porta pottys. Shitboxes. Cabinets of doom. Portable toilets. Plastic shitters.

You see, I would read on Reddit and Facebook and other forms of expression the abject horror people would feel when they were faced with using a portaloo. I thought: “Yeah, they can get a bit stinky, particularly at race startlines with all the nervous shitters, but jesus! It’s just for a few minutes!”

I just didn’t understand the general revulsion until the other week when we were cycling round Stanley Park in Vancouver and stopped at a small park playspace. The park authorities were renovating the public washrooms there, and had put in a bank of hired portaloos. Until then, I didn’t know that North American portaloos aren’t like Australian portaloos. They aren’t the same design.

My Australian friends, North American portaloos DON’T HAVE A BOWL.

Seriously. It’s just a wide mouthed toilet seat and lid, atop a large plastic box with a big hole, filled with blue liquid. (And floating used toilet paper, bobbing like jellyfish). At least with the classic Australian long drop bush toilets there’s a good metre or so between your arse and the pile of poo, but here, there’s not even that. Maybe 15 centimetres, max, between you and a small lake of blue liquid.

That this was not a one off was semi-confirmed last week when we were in Seattle (maybe it’s a Pacific Northwest thing, but still, two different countries). We were heading into an exhibit, and they had a bank of portaloos set up outside. I needed to go, and was a bit curious as to whether my horrific discovery was an aberration, but no – a big old hole again.

The portaloos back home have a seat, a bowl and a flap at the bottom of the bowl connected to a foot operated pump that allows you to blue water flush your waste away into the plastic box, leaving the bowl, if not semi-pristine, at least not completely loaded up with the aftermath of the human digestive system. There is also a small sink with running water (attached to a smaller, foot operated pump) and usually some spray soap in a dispenser so you can wash your hands.

It wasn’t until this trip that I realised that Australian portaloos are relatively civilised.

Australian portaloos give you the ability to pretend that if you were to accidentally drop something into the bowl – a mobile phone, or an energy gel packet – that it would be salvageable. I mean we all know that if anyone actually dropped their iPhone X into a portaloo toilet bowl that they’d immediately be calculating how they feel about disposing of A$1000, but you still get that choice! In North America you don’t get that choice: one poorly angled pocket emptying moment and it’s goodbye device.

So please consider this an apology to my North American brethren; your revulsion is completely understandable.

What makes Setopress particularly good is that if you sprain an ankle or something similar, you’ll want to use compression on the injury site to provide support to the limb.

Setopress bandage

You would be concerned about how much pressure you’re applying, and whether you’re completely stopping blood flow to the extremities, and Setopress factor that in with little rectangles printed on the bandage, which, when stretched properly, become squares. Use the green squares if you want to apply 30mmHg of pressure, and the brown squares if you want to apply 40mmHg of pressure. Every other collection of trail runners would buy Setopress just as a cleverly designed compression bandage, but Australians first think of it as a snake bite bandage.

We’re on holiday in Vancouver, and on Sunday we went for a walk down East Broadway from Main Street, where there are loads of outdoor apparel shops. We went into one, and realised it was more of a hiking and mountaineering shop, rather than trail running, but there’s some crossover and we wanted a sticky beak.

That’s where I discovered clotting sponges.

Yesterday, we hiked up the Grouse Grind – I can’t claim I ran it, because 2.55km at 33% took me 1h40m. I hiked.

I spent most of that time almost bent double hoisting my sorry body up this bloody mountainside, occasionally grappling with my hands (hooray for running gloves) at sharp edged granite rocks that served as steps. Occasionally I’d stop and rest, and look around at this gorgeous forest surrounds, breathing hard and leaning on – sometimes clinging to – a tree. It was beautiful, but it was really bloody hard, and I have no great desire to repeat the exercise (there’s a good reason there’s a $15, seven minute gondola ride up Grouse Mountain).

The Grouse Grind was also educational, because I swear to god I nearly fell down the mountain three times, and after the first time I suddenly understood why Vancouver outdoorsy people pack clotting sponges.

It was fun – I got a nice wide descent after the hill for me, and Jez running with Emma completing the half marathon in just under 3 hours. When Jez got his medal, Melina (the Race Director of PTS) showed him how the medal for Eagle and Child would connect up with the other two medals for the runs in the Winter Series; Jolly Jumbuck and Truth or Consequences making a circular shield. Jez was sold, he was signing up for the other two races.

Which brings me to this morning, and Jolly Jumbuck at Bells Rapids. I’m not stupid, I went the 13km short course option again.

People talk about trail running, and how much fun it is, and they’re not wrong, but I’ve got to wonder if people whom have never run trail before understand quite how different it is to road running.

On road, the only obstacle you have is the occasional stick, fallen gumnut, wandering stray pet or child. That’s about it. You might have a hill, and it might be an absolute corker, but that’s it, it’s bitumen or concrete. On trail, you have umpteen obstacles, but you also have terrain. Today I clambered up a hill in countless other people’s footsteps, through slick, slippery mud clay and great lumps of granite. The bonus was because I chose the short course option I didn’t have to climb it twice.

We went to Feral Brewery afterwards, where one of Jez’s mates, Jimmy, had reserved a table. We all had a bit of a race debrief over lunch, and Six Inch came up in the conversation.

Jimmy has done three trail races; a section of the Margaret River Ultra, Eagle and Child half and the Jolly Jumbuck short course. He said that we were all mad, doing Six Inch, but I firmly believe that even though Six Inch is 47km long, when you’re running it, I swear it feels easier than a short course Perth Trail Series race.

Six Inch is almost all wide fire trails, and where it is singletrack it’s generally not technical, it’s just beautifully runnable. Perth Trail Series are often technical singletrack, and steep, occasionally muddy hills. The elevation for Six Inch is around 1000m, whereas the elevation for the 13 kilometres I ran today was 445m. The ratios of elevation and distance are completely different.

Today’s run was in the bush around Bells Rapids, which is somewhere Jez had never been before, and if I have, I’ve no recollection. We started from the State Equestrian Centre, down the Orlov Trail to the bridge over Bells Rapids, and into the hills above. Around the four kilometre mark you headed left and up, up, up.

With thanks to Smashrun Pro for the elevation part of this graph.

The first few kilometres were runnable, with a queue and a four minute wait for your turn to navigate a scramble over and around a granite outcrop, but it was beautiful. Because I could trip on cloud, I don’t trust myself to run and look up far ahead on trail, I run along looking at the ground three to four metres ahead of me, for the inevitable rock that I’ll trip on, or – in a fun change today – where everyone’s studded footprints suddenly blur and become lines, indicating that the trail has become mud clay and very skiddy. Every time I wanted to see my surroundings I’d stop to look, and a few times I wasted between a good thirty seconds and a maybe more than a couple of minutes taking photos.

That fourth kilometre has at least two minutes where I stood chatting with The Vicar who was marshalling that spot, directing everyone up the most ridiculous hill; twisty singletrack, skiddy mud and steep. Like Snakes and Ladders’ Three Steps, you occasionally you had to grab the rocks along the laughable path in order to haul your way up.

I’m a much happier descender when I’ve got wide trail and options – let me bomb down a hill picking my way down. I’m still not as fast as others, but that’s where I have courage. If it’s technical singletrack I’m not nearly as good, and today at points I had to hike down. There were some bits today where I think if I were mountain biking I’d have been a tiny bit more confident descending, solely because I’d be wearing a helmet.

The last three kilometres were the reverse of the first three, and because I’d now seen Bells Rapids I didn’t feel the need to stop in wonder every three steps I finally made it a decent pace; that said, the amount of rain we’ve seen has made the whitewater very foamy, and I think this year’s Avon Descent race will be a cracker.

The next race is Truth and Consequences. It’s a 50km two lap ultra, a 25km single lap half and a 10km out and back. I’m of two minds – it’s on the Saturday of the Perth Half Marathon weekend, so there’s no earthly way I’d be able to do a PB at Perth Half after having done the Partial Truth 10km, but the thought of doing all three PTS Winter Series makes me so tempted to ditch the Perth Half and do Truth instead.

Perth Trail Series races are testing, but that sense of accomplishment is fairly addictive. And as Claire Bradstreet posted on her Instagram about today’s race “Lost for words and a little traumatised, but alive”.

I had signed up through FOMO (fear of missing out) instead of desire back in July when entries opened. While we’d been trail running for training, I hadn’t been enjoying it like I used to. For the first time ever I’d had a negative voice in my head – it had three specific chatty lines:

“Ooh, you won’t be able to keep up that pace on race day – that’s way too fast if you want to survive 47km.”

“Ooh, you want to be a bit careful here, you might wreck your ankles again on that surface. Better slow down.”

“Ooh, that pace is a bit slow, you won’t make the cut-off for the aid stations at that pace. You need to be a tiny bit faster.”

Marry those three lines together, and you have the funnest vicious circle ever!

It came to a head when we ran a training run on Yaberoo Trail near Yanchep National Park, and I had a tiny cry when I realised I needed to withdraw. We got to the National Park, and Vince, Didi and Jez ran on and did the Ghosthouse Trail, while I sat down under the trees at one of the tables and composed my email to Dave Kennedy, withdrawing from the race and offering my services as a volunteer.

I hit send, and instantly felt simultaneously relieved and stupendously excited – if I wasn’t doing Six Inch, then I’d be on fine form in February to do the Busselton Half Marathon, and then the new Runningworks Thornlie Half Marathon. After the last time I did Six Inch it took me until past April to do anything over 10 kilometres.

A couple of weeks later we did a loop of the Munday Brook trail in Karragullen and I loved every minute of it, and happily ran along without that chatty negative voice in my head. I’d done 29km on the Six Inch course with Marnie a couple of weeks before the Yaberoo run and in amongst that were some amazing downhills that I sped down and thoroughly enjoyed, but this time that joy was throughout my run. It was inspiring.

Dave gave me a few options for volunteering, and I accepted the finish line assistance role, which it turned out was being the presenter of finishers medals to everyone who had raced. This was just what I needed – I got to see everyone finish, and for the first time ever I got to see the fast guys run further than the trail dogleg at Aid 2. It was a surprisingly cold and wet December day, and Scotty Hawker and Nera Jareb both managed new course records – Scotty coming in in 3 hours 15 minutes, and Nera coming in 3 hours 42 minutes. I stood at that finish line for four hours, handing out medal after medal to the half and full marathon finishers, and enjoyed every minute.

One person crossed the line at 6 hours 53 minutes which was my finish time in 2014. I remember thinking while watching him barrel down the finish chute “That’s a really bloody long time to be out on course. It is definitely time to work on speed.”

So that’s my goal now – I need to be faster, probably over all distances, but definitely on trail. The negative voice in my head might have technically been correct, but now I have more of a concrete plan which has definitely quieted the negative spin. Jeremy is fully supportive of this plan – I have lots of road race plans this year, including my personal Kimetto Challenge, which is to get a half marathon time of 2h02m57s (or less!) because that’s the World Record time for the marathon and would make me half as fast as Dennis Kimetto. I also need to get out on trail and use Bickley and Munday Brook trails to give me 12 months of trail running practice, not the inevitable “four months before Six Inch” push. (Assuming I enter in 2018).

Interval sessions are also on the horizon – with one fun bonus that I had been previously vaguely conscious of, but unaware of official confirmation. Every time I’ve ever done intervals in the early morning I have felt wildly cheery afterwards. I thought it was just the inevitable early morning smug “I’ve totally exercised already, bitches! I don’t have to do anything more today!” feeling that you can sometimes feel, but no! It’s actually brain-derived neurotrophic factor!

We were at the launch of Yokine parkrun and our friend Sarah came along. We were talking afterwards and she mentioned that interval sessions are like DIY antidepressants (Sarah’s a psychologist). She later found me this Journal of Applied Physiology article: High-intensity interval training evokes larger serum BDNF levels compared with intense continuous exercise which explains it all, but how cool is that?

So I have a bit of a plan, inspiration, and a pretty positive outlook. And I intend to keep following my GP’s advice “do what makes you happy”, because if it doesn’t make you happy, why try and force something?

Taken by Dennis Tan of Paparazzi on the Run on Digby Drive, Rottnest Island.

Last year was the first year that the West Australian Marathon Club arranged a very early morning ferry to bring runners to Rottnest Island on race day, and added a half marathon to their Rottnest Island Running Festival. Instead of having to stay on Rottnest Island the night before the race, it was possible to get up at stupid o’clock, head into Fremantle to hop on a ferry from B Shed and go and run a marathon or a half marathon. It appealed to a lot of people; so much so that the previously sceptical ferry service operator moved the early morning ferry booking from the smaller capacity ferry to the larger ferry, and then eventually had to use both of them to transport everyone.

I ran the half marathon, and Jeremy and Didi ran the marathon. We loved it. It was wonderful, a multiple lap course on the settlement end of the island, taking in Thomson, Little Armstrong and Geordie Bays. Yes, it was a bit hot and exposed, but the scenery was stunning and best of all, the course had welcome variation in elevation. I’ve never been a massive fan of the current Perth Marathon course, I suspect partly because I’ve run a fair bit around the Swan River, but also because the only real elevation change you experience is when you run over the bridge at the Narrows. Until I saw Rottnest I’d never really been inspired to do a road marathon.

WAMC opened entries for the 2017 event the month after the 2016 race, and I entered the marathon. Jeremy and I decided that this time we wanted to stay on the island for a few days. Aware that accommodation on the island can book out for events like the Running Festival, in December we booked a chalet at Thomson Bay North. Now all I had to do was train for the race.

Well, as recently discussed, my preparation took a few hits early on in 2017. I neglected Sunday long runs fairly regularly until June. A July 9th 20 km run was the furthest I’d run since a spectacularly crap 18 km on January 8th. I’d entered the WAMC Perth half marathon the Wednesday before on a whim, and then Thursday promptly fell ill with a bit of a cold. I slept in on Saturday instead of going to parkrun and when I started the race on Sunday August 6th I might have been feeling a lot better, but I certainly didn’t expect a new PB half marathon time of 2h04m, but there you go.

I entered City to Surf half marathon with roughly the same amount of pre-planning. I thought the lack of parkrunning the day before might have been beneficial for Perth half, so I gave it another lackadaisical crack and August 27th ran a far slower half marathon but on a much hillier course. A few weeks later Jeremy and I bunked off to Malaysia for the Formula 1 and then on to Singapore, and on October 7th we ran a wonderful and stupendously humid half marathon race mostly through East Coast Park in Singapore.

I think what I’m trying to say is that the idea of having any plan for training for this marathon wasn’t followed through on, and might have ended roughly 2 days after I printed out a training plan from the internet.

I couldn’t bring myself to drop from the full marathon to the half marathon, but I wasn’t concerned, because I’d run the course last year, and it was a lap course. You started with a stretch from Thomson Bay Settlement out towards Kingston Barracks and back again, then off you go past the resort building, across the salt lake causeway on Digby Drive, turn right down Defence Road, left and up and around the peak at Little Armstrong Bay, to Geordie Bay and then back past Pink Lake to the settlement. Re-run that loop once more for the half, and three more times for the marathon. And finish.

I knew I was undertrained. There was no getting around the fact that if I tried to get a spectacular time all I would do was blow up spectacularly, and probably break my body in the process. I knew I had to do this sensibly. Well, as sensibly as you can when you’re planning on running a marathon as undertrained as I was.

My plan was to do the two laps that would constitute a half marathon - that held no fears, I would be able to do that with no problems. A third lap would give me 30 km, which would be useful training for Six Inch, and a fourth lap was only going to happen if I was unbroken, and likely to remain unbroken. Even though there were five drink stations on the 10 km loop course I was going to use a small soft 250ml handheld flask so I’d almost always have fluids, and I would carry food and gels as well as hold supplies at one of the drink stations along with my own drink bottle with double strength electrolytes.

When I got to the island on Friday I rode the course and worked out where I’d give myself permission to walk. It was the Digby Drive hill after the salt lake causeway, the hill at Little Armstrong Bay and the hill into Geordie Bay. On Saturday I went to the start line to pick up Jeremy’s marathon bib and discovered that the course had changed slightly this year - instead of turning right after the Geordie Bay General Store and going down past Pink Lake to the road and left to the settlement, we went a sharp left into Fays Bay and Longreach Bay, around to the Basin, past the camping grounds and down through the Thomson Bay North settlement to the start finish line. When Jeremy came over on the afternoon Saturday ferry, we both cycled the newer course, checking out the gorgeous new section around Longreach and the Basin. I gave myself permission to also walk a very steep hill just after Longreach up to the Basin.

The race started with bagpipers, as it always does, and as we headed down towards Kingston Barracks I knew that I was going too fast for someone with my training history. I couldn’t successfully will myself to do slower than 6m30s kilometres; probably because whilst more popular, the marathon field at Rottnest is generally small and fast, so I was already well up the back of the field. On the first lap I kept my walk break promises, but had inadvertently run the Little Armstrong hill before the two bagpipers that stay there for the whole race - it appeared it was easier to run up than it was to cycle up, so I decided to just run that hill for all the laps. There were spots where I considered the walk break started and finished, and for the first two laps I kept to those fairly religiously, except for one moment when I was trying to breathe at the same time as I consumed a Clif Bar.

Taken by Dennis Tan of Paparazzi on the Run at Little Armstrong Bay, Rottnest Island.

All of the drink stations are manned by army cadets and I stopped at nearly every single one and refilled my small handheld flask. I had felt slightly foolish doing this, until I got to Longreach Bay on my second lap and witnessed a distressed runner being cared for by Lauren Shelley. As I was running down the chalet road I’d seen the runner up ahead almost completely lose the ability to walk or stand - Lauren had already called the ambulance by this point. After that I had no foolish qualms about topping up with electrolytes and/or water. I was going to be one of the slowest people on the course, and it was going to be midday by the time I finished. The faster runners wouldn’t be experiencing the heat I was going to, so it made a lot of sense to carry my own fluids.

At the end of the second lap I realised just before I was going to turn left out of the settlement area that I needed to go to the loo, so I double backed and went to one of the public toilets. It was actually a bit of a treat - I got to sit down in the cool for a while, I got to wash my hands and wet my hat. I gave myself a quick mental once-over. What hurt? Was it pain or soreness? Was it an injury or just the fact that I’d been running 20 or so kilometres? I was fine, so I set out for the next 10 kilometres.

The salt lake causeway was getting hotter, and by the time I’d got halfway down Defence Road I’d realised that my inner thighs felt like they needed more Bodyglide anti-chafe. This was not ideal, but I decided that I could nip into the chalet and reapply on my way through the Thomson Bay North area - the chalet was two streets off course. When I got to Geordie Bay there was a delightful lady offering runners a jug of water over the head, and I gratefully availed myself of the service. Joy of joys, not long afterwards I realised that I hadn’t needed more Bodyglide, I’d just needed to wash off the salt crystals that had developed on my skin. When I got to the Basin there was a beach shower next to the toilet block, so I rinsed off further with that, and then headed into the settlement.

At this point I knew I was going to complete this marathon. I felt fine; no tiredness or hunger, no injury or excessive soreness. I headed out past the resort with what felt like the biggest smile on my face. Over the causeway and for the first time my post-causeway hill walk break started close to the bottom of the hill rather than halfway up. I got to Defence Road and felt a little uncomfortable until I started walking halfway down the road and could then rip the most tremendously loud farts. It is moments like this that you appreciate being one of the people at the back of the pack and thus well spaced out and alone, because I’m not sure that openly speculating “ooh I really really hope this is a fart” is considered something you can say in any company, polite or not.

I got to the Little Armstrong left turn and received my gold coin that Rottnest Marathon tradition required me to pay to the bagpipers for their time. Of course, by the time I reached the top of that hill the pipers had been packed off to the finish line so I gave my coin to one of the army cadet volunteers, deputising him as a piper. I wasn’t upset at this - those poor pipers had been in the hot sun all day, and traditional bagpiper dress generally doesn’t factor in Western Australian weather.

For the first time in the race I walked down the hill from the aid station to the turn left to head towards Parakeet Bay and Geordie Bay, and then set off in my trot. I don’t know how far I had travelled when I saw in the distance the unmistakable shape of Jeremy pedalling his Cannondale. I can spot that man’s pedal stroke a mile away, and I was very pleased to see him. He was very pleased that I was where I was and he didn’t have to ride up the hill to the turn off for Little Armstrong Bay.

All race long the marathon club had hijacked one of the few cars on Rottnest Island and drove laps of the course checking on the aid station volunteers and the runners. They drove up alongside me and asked how I was and whether I needed more water, and I said I was fine, and gestured to Jeremy a little way ahead on his bike saying “he's with me”. They headed off and Jeremy and I talked as I trotted my way up to Geordie Bay. Jeremy mentioned the heat from the sun and gave me a quick test. When I successfully multiplied 7 and 5 he decided I was fine. Two marathon club volunteers pedalled up behind me as we turned into Geordie Bay checking how I was. I reached the chalet where the lady with the bucket of water had been; the lady and the jug had disappeared, but half a bucket of water still remained, so I carefully tipped some of it over my head. The WAMC volunteers on bikes took this as a good sign that I was still compos mentis.

The army cadets at Geordie Bay clearly had the best position, because by this point they had bought ice from the shop for the drink station and were getting stuck into icypoles as well. Jeremy and I went up the hill into Fays Bay and on to Longreach where we saw Lauren and she took a photo of me, congratulating me on my marathon. I laughed when we got to the Basin hill, because while this time I was technically running up it, I think I could have walked just as fast.

Taken by Dennis Tan of Paparazzi on the Run on Digby Drive, Rottnest Island.

At one kilometre to go, Jeremy pedalled off up ahead so that he could put the bike away in the chalet and I headed down into the beautiful grove of trees near the campground for the final time. It was so nice being able to say goodbye and thank you to all the volunteers. I came up to the final turn, and nearly got taken out by a child on a bicycle as I headed into the finish chute. I looked up and realised I would cross the line at 5 hours and 29 minutes, which amused me - had I actually trained for this, I was hoping for something around 4 hours 30 minutes, so it looks like being sensibly stupid only costs an extra hour.

I got met at the finish line by Jules from the marathon club who thrust a Powerade bottle in my hand whilst I was awarded my medal, shirt and goodie bag. Jacinta came over to congratulate me on my finish and I slightly dazedly wandered out of the finish area. I came across Jeremy now bikeless and he guided me to the bakery where we bought pies, him an ice coffee and me a strawberry milk because they’d sold out of chocolate. I felt dizzy, nauseous and massively hungry all at the same time, so I slowly ate as my adrenalin subsided and my blood pressure returned to normal.

I had done it and I had enjoyed every bit of it. Even in the last five kilometres when I walked a bit more than I'd intended, it felt like the walking was more because I was happy out there rather than because I couldn't run any more.

I realise now how helpful that race has been for my brain. When I signed up for this year's Six Inch I knew I was only signing up because of FOMO (fear of missing out), so I gave myself a deadline of November 14th by which time I had to decide whether I was going to run the race or if I was going to volunteer instead. But by about 33 km in to Rottnest Marathon I remember thinking “Yes, I’m doing Six Inch this year”. There’s no fear about not being able to finish, about getting to Aid 1 and being too tired and an hour slower than I ought to be. It’s only 5 km longer than Rotto, and admittedly a lot hillier, but I get eight hours to run it. And at least this year I’ll have done a training run further than 29 km, which is an improvement on 2014.

The point I knew I needed to go to the doctor was around the 18km mark of the 2016 Six Inch Trail Marathon. I came to the conclusion I needed to withdraw from the event once I had  reached the first Aid Station at 23km. I was far too tired than I ought to have been and was at least one hour slower than I thought I should have been. The training for Six Inch that year had been surprisingly difficult - both in effort expended, and in reluctance to train. I was tired and unmotivated all the time.

Monday after the race I went to the doctors and got an order for blanket blood tests - in essence, every single blood test that you could perform on a female. Anaemia and hypothyroidism run in my family, and the symptoms of those also mirror those of depression. Going through a checklist of symptoms I was ticking off a fair few. I had refrained from Dr Googling my way through my symptoms; the last time I’d done something like that was back in 2001 when I had reactive lymph nodes. Having presented with quite obvious sizable lumps in my neck, I was puzzled at my doctor’s insistence during the consultation that it was probably glandular fever. That was until l had researched my way to the non-Hodgkin lymphoma entry in the medical encyclopaedia at the public library, and upon reading that I decided that glandular fever sounded tremendous in comparison.

I had my blood drawn on Tuesday morning and the test results came back Wednesday afternoon. I was blood perfect; even my cholesterol. So that left depression as a likely probability. The doctor suggested that if the training regime to complete an ultramarathon wasn’t giving me the serotonin boost that I needed, it might be worthwhile looking into medication options, and also talking to a psychologist about what the trigger might have been to my general malaise. He suggested that I try and enjoy my Christmas holiday break - my office closes down for ten days over Christmas and the New Year - and see how I progressed afterwards.

I went back to work January 2nd, and felt pretty OK, but it wasn’t until I found myself crying for no good reason in the shower the morning of January 12th that I realised that my upbeat mood hadn’t lasted much more than that first day. I talked to Jeremy, sent a text to my boss telling her I wasn’t coming in and that I was literally taking a mental health day to see the doctor about likely depression, then made an appointment for that morning.

The doctor I’d spoken to before Christmas was on leave so I’d booked in to see another one - the female doctor at the clinic who’d helped me out with my multiple ear infections. She was excellent. She went through the paperwork for a Medicare mental health plan, which would subsidise ten psychologists appointments, and gave me a prescription for 10mg daily of Lexapro (escitalopram).

I went straight to the chemist to fill the prescription, then came home and took my first tablet. That afternoon I had an hour appointment with the clinic’s resident psychologist, and by the end of the hour she had me nailed. It was awesome. It felt like I’d been stuck on a trail somewhere in the dark, batteries dead in my headlamp, all the while knowing that there was a dirty great hole that I had to navigate around and being too afraid to take a step. She’d swung a floodlight on the trail, showing me the way through.

I’m a pretty introspective person, and for a while I’d had a gut feeling that something was wrong, but I’d not been able to put my finger on it. I’d mentally picked through my job description, trying to work out why I was unmotivated at work and what part of my job was I not enjoying. Perhaps a change in workplace was a good idea? I’d been in my current role since 2008. I hadn’t really realised that I was unmotivated to clean at home, because - well hell, in 2014 Jeremy and I had worked out that if both of us were training for Six Inch, the housework was going to slide. And why on earth would you question being tired all the time? See: training for an ultramarathon.

I’d wrecked my left ankle June 16th, the same day as shit went down at work. Jeremy and I had gone out that evening for a run to work out my emotions, and then I hit the deck courtesy of a heap of gumnuts dropped by the local flock of cockatoos. We’d booked a holiday to New Zealand for early July, and while there I wrecked my right ankle, basically through loss of proprioception in my left. My emotional vent was crippled, and my brain chemistry did not cope well.

The medication worked fast for me, the chemist and doctor had both said that it might take up to a month to work, but after three days on Lexapro I realised I’d not felt this good in quite some time. I had probably been self medicating with exercise for about 12 months or so, and then just when I needed running the most, it was taken away from me. I described it to people as “if perfect is 100%, I think I’ve been at 90-95% for a while, and when I wrecked my ankles I eventually tumbled to about 60%.” I was still functioning, I was still able to take care of myself, but I was not whole. I was not right.

I decided that I needed to be kind to myself this year - I had to practice self care. For running, that meant I needed to be able to choose my running activities without guilt; I had to stop putting pressure on myself. I had re-injured my right ankle January 7th - not to the same extent as I had back in July 2016, but enough for me to recognise I had to withdraw from Lark Hill, and at that point I decided that any running events in the near future would be entered fairly late in the game - it eliminated any training pressure that I might feel, or the chance of training guilt weighing on my mind.

The two things I kept doing was parkrun and Tuesday night darkrun. I enjoy both; neither of them generate that pressure that I was trying to avoid. At darkrun there is a regular group of people who run intervals, and have ‘warm-up’ runs ahead of the darkrun session so their evening totals can be 12-15km, but at the other end of the spectrum there are people who just run their Tuesday evening 5km. And parkrun is parkrun - the closest you get to pressure with parkrun is what you put on yourself: beating your PB, or some secret parkrun racing where you decide you have to beat a fellow parkrunner, who is probably entirely oblivious of their nemesis status.

When I filled that first prescription of Lexapro the chemist advised me that from now on any non-steroidal anti inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs - ibuprofen, celebrex, voltaren etc) were out of bounds. They slow down kidney function, which means that the Lexapro could stay in my kidneys for longer than it ought, causing damage. Any sports injuries would have to be treated only with ice, heat, painkillers like paracetamol/acetaminophen and what I not-so-kindly call unicorn fart cream; the herbal concoctions that tend to have lots of menthol or melaleuca.

With only really being able to take paracetamol for sports injuries I generally live with the pain until it just becomes a bit too much, at which point I’ll take two paracetamol and see how I feel when they wear off. There’s the issue with painkillers that if I can’t feel the injury then I have been known to make them worse because I’m no longer getting that “oooh, don’t do that!” sense, whereas with mild NSAIDs like ibuprofen it decreases the pain because it decreases the swelling, but there is usually some residual pain that can be felt.

I remember in 2015 when we thought I’d developed a stress fracture in my foot but it turned out that I’d torn my peroneus brevis. I was prescribed celebrex; a strong NSAID and an absolute wonder drug. It took the inflammation down so much that I felt no pain, and I could stand with full weight on a foot where hours previously I’d only been able to tentatively touch the ground with my big toe. I was advised that it would take 2-3 days for it to work out of my system when I took my final dose, so after 3 weeks I stopped taking the single daily celebrex. Three days later my entire body ached, because the celebrex had stopped everything else from hurting too, so I’d not noticed my hips and glutes tightened, and the subsequent pressure on my lower back.

Ten months into no NSAIDs I feel like this is the strongest and most injury free I’ve been in years. I was never a frequent ibuprofen taker if I could avoid it, but now that I need to deal with inflammation without medication I’ve found myself more aware of and feel more connected to how my body feels. I’ve been combining this awareness with the techniques that I learnt from Lauren Shelley; the pilates moves, the self massage for runners, and the rule of thumb with my body that if something hurts, it’s rarely the part that aches that is the problem, it’s usually bodyparts adjacent that are the culprit.

When I went to the doctors in June for a repeat Lexapro prescription the doctor went through the standard form depression diagnosis questionnaire with me and said that I no longer exhibited signs of depression. He said it was up to me whether I started to wean myself off the medication (going cold turkey off Lexapro is a very bad idea). I said that I’d like to stay on it for a while longer, until I felt properly re-settled back at work.

The idea of the slow wean did percolate in my brain for a month or so until I had yet another revelation early morning in the shower: I’d signed up for the 2017 Rottnest Marathon when entries opened in November 2016, and I’d also entered the 2017 Six Inch Trail Marathon. Lexapro was the thing that had restored that interest in exiting the house for a run. It had restored my energy levels to the point that I’d not feel worn out after Tuesday night darkrun. Lexapro was the thing that made it so much easier to discern the difference between a simple desire for a lazy day on the couch and the constant flat exhaustion of depression. Who on earth would think it was a good idea to wean yourself off this in the lead up to a marathon and an ultra marathon?!

Turns out that if you have a trying work year your running life suffers.

Turns out if you don't (hindsight and mathematics) train sufficiently for Six Inch it sucks the life out of you by Aid 1 and you withdraw.

Very happy I did.

Turns out that if things don't go to plan there are often some positives to be found, one being that because I didn't continue on and run until it became a death march on course close to cut-off time I haven't developed any injuries from the race and am in good shape to enter Lark Hill 25k.

The class was successful in releasing my niggles but frustrating. I was part entertained by the graceful flow that the yoga teacher had; she easily moved from one pose to the next, whilst I looked like a mid-sized JCB telehandler trying to imitate her movements. At the same time it all felt a bit mortifying; her flow was graceful, but fast, and I'd feel about 3 steps behind with each pose. Also the hippy chat shit me. So I never went back.

Around the end of May I randomly got some spam from Runner's World magazine. I haven't subscribed in years, so I was surprised to get any emails from them, and almost immediately deleted it. I saw something like Become a faster and stronger runner in the subject line and held off from deleting; opening it up expecting a teaser about an article in the next issue. I realised that they were selling a DVD called Yoga for Runners. It was a two disc DVD, it had a few routines on it, including a beginners routine and was only $19.95, which included shipping, so I cracked out my "wasteful spending" credit card (aka the Stupid Fund for Stupid Things), and bought a copy.

It turned up about a week after I fucked my left ankle, so I took the plastic off it, chucked it on my laptop and had a quick watch whilst flopped on the couch with my foot in the air. The presenter, Rebecca Pacheco refrained from most of the hippy chat, which was a big plus, and appeared to factor in all abilities. When I realised that generally she would try and take you from the easier technique through to the harder version (the reverse of the yoga class teacher) I felt like I hadn't wasted $20. And best of all, I could pause and rewind as needed.

I'm sort of following a training plan for Six Inch, and it has a flexibility part to it which I think I need at the moment more than anything. Tonight I felt like I'd regained enough balance to give the beginners routine on the DVD a shot, and it went OK. I managed to follow along relatively well, only having to rewind once. I can't sit on my heels any more (I can barely get the tops of my feet to touch the floor at all), but I didn't fall over. I did notice that it's going to take some serious effort to get me to be able to successfully hold even the beginners tree pose.

Work is part sponsoring six weeks of lunchtime yoga and pilates classes. I've signed up for Tuesday pilates, so with that plus the beginner's yoga routine, I hope I can get back that ankle flexibility and balance that I used to enjoy.

Going in my biggest concern was Malcolm Street; 700m into the race you come up off the Terrace, on the Freeway overpass and up the Malcolm Street hill to Kings Park Road. It's still packed with people, and that's where in the past I've nearly cannoned into suddenly stopping runners who become walkers, or people who think they're being good by pulling over to the left when they realise that they're going to have to start to walk, but fail to look over their left shoulder and make sure that they aren't going to cut anyone off as they pull left.

It was ridiculously cold on the Terrace this year - there's always a wind chill factor there, but this time it must have been in the low single digits. Jeremy and I had come in with Nat and parked under my work building, so Jeremy had headed off for his half marathon and Nat and I went upstairs to my work to stay warm. Nat was in Wave 3 and I was in Wave 2, and when the assembly time for Wave 2 rolled around we diligently headed downstairs, got halfway to the assembly area then looked at each other and decided that if I was going to stay at the back of the wave, I could afford to head to the assembly area a bit later. We turned around and bolted back to the building lobby where it was warm.

At 9.07am I headed off to the assembly area and found it almost empty. I was a bit puzzled as I'd checked and double checked the start time for Wave 2 and it had definitely been 9.15am. I trotted up William Street to the Terrace and saw Ash and Amanda talking and we stood chatting waiting for 9.15am. A traffic management bloke wandered up to us and said to Ash and I that our wave had already left, and we explained that last year anyone who had left in the time bracket for a preceding wave had been disqualified. He shrugged at us and wandered off, just as it hit 9.15am. I guess someone in charge decided that the chance of someone dropping from hypothermia on the Terrace was too great and they shuffled us off early. It ticked over to 9.15am and Ash and I headed off saying goodbye to Amanda who was heading to her walk wave assembly area.

It was brilliant; just like my Sydney half marathon run - the streets were clear and I made it up to Kings Park Road before I had anyone from Wave 3 overtake me. My left ankle only generated that parkrun-stopping pain once when near the top of Thomas Street I spotted Ash up ahead, and picked up the pace to catch up with him whilst cresting the hill and turning left onto Hay Street. When I felt the stabbing pain I eased up on pace, remembered my plan to run my race at my pace, not someone else's and the pain immediately dissipated.

I learnt a certain amount of tolerance during the race; not of pain, but of sound. There's a running technique called Galloway method. Developed by Jeff Galloway it's is a genius idea - run your entire race with a specific run/walk interval. Maybe run three minutes and walk one minute, and repeat the entire way, start of race through to finish. You have a watch setting that does a quiet beep when each interval starts and ends, and thousands of people have used this method to run marathons injury-free. But this woman didn't have a running watch, she had an enormous Samsung phone strapped to her forearm, playing music and overlaying the music some sort of app that indicated a walk break with a low rumbly sound of a basketball shot clock timing out and the run interval was indicated by this violently loud and squeaky alarm clock sound of "bip-bip-bip-beep bip-bip-bip-beep!". Every twenty five seconds. Yes, her Galloway interval was run 15 seconds, walk 10 seconds. So every 25 seconds I heard "bip-bip-bip-beep bip-bip-bip-beep!"

For kilometres. And kilometres.

And she was running my pace. I'd come across her just after I'd turned onto Hay Street and realised that there was no escape. If I tried to push the pace my left ankle may decide to get shitty with me, and I was only 3km in. My right ankle couldn't be called comfortable, and I knew I was pretty much on my speed limit at that point. I was going to have to deal with bleepy woman for a while. We went past the Nova Radio offices, so there was a short while where it was drowned out with music. I tried to make use of the downhills, and the Underwood Avenue hill was a delight, because she had to walk that one, but she must have flown down the other side because she popped up again at Perry Lakes.

Now I'd gone into the race prepared to have to walk at some point, but by Perry Lakes I'd not yet had to, so I'm pleased to say that the only time I had to walk was stepping in and out of a portaloo at the 8.5km mark, which meant that bleepy woman went ahead of me. Such a relief.

I carried on up the final hills and finished my 12km in 1h28m44s. My legs are good sore, my feet are a bit sore, but my spirit is well up there.

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The timing was quite shit for two reasons: 1) because the Saturday beforehand I had gone to the Canning River parkrun pacer day and chased the 25 minute pacer, notching up a 25m10s, which is 11 seconds off my overall parkrun PB. What was more impressive is that I'm at least 5kg heavier than I was when I managed that, and I've not started training for Six Inch again, so that was just off a few long runs and fartlek sessions. 2) was because the only race that had appealed in recent times was King of the Mountain, a 16km trail race uphill from Helena Valley to Mundaring Weir, and that was July 3rd, two weeks into my healing period.

The swelling has now almost completely subsided, and I've now run on it four times - Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and today, parkrunday. My instructions were to try and only run on softer surfaces for a few runs.

Sunday's run was a slow 2.5km, predominantly around the oval near our house, with reasonable success. The soft underfoot would allow me to accidentally step on a gumnut and have it pushed deep into the dirt and grass rather than tilt my foot to jar my ankle. Even still, every leaf on the ground was a gumnut in my mind and thus dodged.

Tuesday's run was 3km at darkrun with less success, looping back after 1km and returning to the start via a lot of grass instead of the regular path and then 1km around the grassed picnic area. My immediate suspicions were well-founded, and the niggles I had were relieved by use of my spikey ball underfoot, foam roller on my quads in particular and using the muscle stick down the strip of muscle on outside of my left shin.

Thursday's run nearly didn't happen because it bucketed down in the afternoon and evening but when we got home it had stopped raining for a while. Because soccer training was on the oval was lit up so I felt comfortable to do laps of the oval. I stayed fairly steady on speed until I hit 3km, when I picked it up a bit and after another lap I threw in a sprint, then eased off after about 80m, jogged for a bit, then another sprint. I headed home and stopped the Garmin on 4.2km feeling immensely pleased.

There was no increase in swelling on Thursday night, but Friday morning the ankle was sore - a dull, but noticable ache that felt like it was inside the ankle structure rather than from the muscle on the outside. I ibuprofened once and the rest of the day I was fine.

This morning was Pioneer parkrun, and I was pretty trepidatious. There is so much tree cover there are usually hard nuts and sticks everywhere on the course, so having been told oh-so-helpfully "you'll be fine, just as long as you don't roll your ankle again" I really didn't want to do that. This was going to be my first run back on majority hard surfaces and also the first hilly terrain I'd tried to run on, so the possibilities of something going a bit wrong were higher than I'd prefer.

Jeremy and a number of our Pioneer friends have noticed that if you run Pioneer a lot it can test your left ankle due to the excessive number of sharp left turns on the course. With this in mind my aim was to be kind, avoid rolling my ankle, walk if necessary and to stop if I needed to (at Pioneer you actually return to the start area 5 times during the course from various directions, so you can choose to cut your run short if required).

The second full lap I had to walk most of the stretch of grass behind the duck ponds, such was the amount of mud and slipping. The way I describe niggles is that you can 'feel' the affected area. So when my hamstrings are a bit tight, their existence is obvious, but when they're fine they operate normally and I can't consciously feel them. So while I could feel my ankle the whole way round, it was like a steady low grumble that can be acknowledged and then ignored. It only shouted "Oi!" when I hit the sharp left U-turn just before the final boardwalk section on my final 200m home.

34m05s and crossed fingers hopefully no issues tomorrow morning.

We had come down to Busselton for Quit Forest Rally April 2011 and saw on the wall at Fat Duck Cycles and Espresso a clipped out article from a local paper about Delirium, a 24 hour road race in Cowaramup. It had been held the previous week, and Jeremy was immediately captivated by the idea of it. Come April 21st 2012 Jeremy and I found ourselves at a 3.6km open road circuit in a new Cowaramup housing estate along with Colin Prior, the both of them heading off into this race on the basis of a one dollar bet between them.

Colin's body broke down on him during D2, so Jeremy won the bet, hitting 447km. Jeremy and I didn't camp at Cowaramup that year, just setting up the gazebo tent and a stretcher bed underneath it for me. Around 10pm I went to sleep for a couple of hours and when Jeremy realised he needed to sleep he came over, woke me and I drove us back to Busselton to Cathy's house to shower and sleep, returning around 6am for the final push.

We had to miss D3 and D4, returning for D5 on the March 14th 2015. We'd learnt from D2; this time we had the Captiva and an air mattress in the back, so we could shorten the time off course by about 2 hours. But the weather gods were not kind to D5, and Cyclone Olwyn meant it rained almost solid for the first 21-22 hours of the 24 hour  event, only getting fine just as Jeremy was winding up trying to crack as close to 500 km as he could get. The first six hours of gale force winds we decided were probably going to limit him to about 450 km again. His final stop for assistance was aided by Cathy and Greg who had come to cheer him on for the last couple of hours. They grabbed Jeremy and his bike to stop him falling over while he was finally able to swap into a short-sleeved jersey at the same time that I shoved a peanut butter sandwich in his mouth. In Formula 1 terms it was an excellent pitstop. By the end of the race, he'd wound up the speed and effort, finishing D5 with 477km done.

2016 D6 the aim was 500km again. It was going to be held on a new closed course in Busselton, the housing estate in Cowaramup was becoming more and more built-up, so the risk of annoying the currently still quite tolerant locals was high. The new circuit was announced as a 2.02 km loop around Barnard Park, which was going to make the race more interesting - no great rises, no non-bicycle traffic, and four clear corners where the previous loop in Cowaramup had only two definite corners, the rest being gentle bends that were relatively easy to navigate even after 20+ hours of cycling.

Colin had competed at D4, 14 months after his big crash in Adelaide in January 2013, his still repairing shoulder seizing up on the Sunday morning and taking him out of the race. His D5 hadn't gone so well either, with his only bike having a major mechanical fault, wrecking his race at around 2am. For D6 Colin had followed Jeremy's idea and brought a second bike with him, the Contarini in case his beloved Baum had another issue. Jeremy had brought his faithful Cannondale and Fred, the Azzuri Forza to all the Delirium's that he'd competed in, D6 being no exception.

The race started off in amazing conditions. Every Delirium we'd been in had been plagued by rain; D5 had been moved to March in an attempt to avoid April downpours, only to clash with a cyclone instead, so Brendan Morrison - the race director - just threw up his hands and went back to April showers for D6, but the Saturday actually felt a bit too warm and dry at one point. I was sure the winds would pick up later; every time we'd come to the Busselton foreshore in the afternoon and early evening the wind had been gusting. If you look closely at the lights in the developed area of the foreshore around the Equinox Cafe and the Busselton jetty you'll see that they're actually wind powered, so to have warm, still air was disconcerting to say the least.

Jeremy set out to get a good couple of hundred kilometres done straight off the bat. We'd set up Fred as his primary bike, complete with his Mavic Cosmic wheels. Once the event had started and Jeremy and Colin were riding laps I set about preparing his second bike - the Cannondale - ready for use; removing the saddle bag, setting up the lights front and back and making sure the tyres were at the right pressure. Once that was done I continued to set up our campsite and also started preparing some food for Jeremy to eat on the bike. All the while Jeremy and Colin were sailing past, round and round and round. Where we were situated was perfect for handovers; there was an exit to the left of us to take you off course and down the outside of the main straight past the tents, with our tent at the very start of the row. You could then continue on past three or four more tents, and back onto the course. Jeremy and Colin could just pull in and I could swap bottles and hand over food easily. A couple of times Jeremy and I attempted to do a traditional bottle pass while he was moving, but most of the time the traffic of other competitors meant that it just wasn't safe and or feasible. Because Colin was based with us I worked as support crew for him as well; swapping bottles and handing over gels.

Once I felt the site was set up I got a bit of reading done, but not that much - Jeremy's mum and dad had come to Busselton to support Jeremy and spectate so some of the time I was talking to them. Jeremy's mum and dad went off at one point to do a bit of shopping in Busselton, and I went off to the Kent Street Bakery to get Jeremy and I some lunch. A few hours later when his parents had come back I went off in the car to buy some supplies that we hadn't had time to pick up in Perth before the race as well as get some fuel. We were staying at Cathy's place again, so I went there and dropped off some of the supplies then headed back to the foreshore.

Jeremy managed his 200 kilometres in under six hours. The plan for dusk was to do a very quick swap of bikes; the Cannondale ready to go with the less intense lights on. Jeremy grabbed it and headed back out, while I set up the Forza for late night riding with his heavy-duty lights. Once that was done I called in an order to Al Forno, a great restaurant to the west of the Busselton CBD on the Bussell Highway - Jeremy wanted lasagne and hot chips and we'd decided that after 8pm would be perfect. I brought back the food, and Jeremy ate half the lasagne (honestly, one serve would have fed two people anyway) and all the hot chips - he'd smelt some earlier in the day and had a craving. He had a gingerbread man for dessert that I'd bought at the bakery earlier that day, and headed back out.

From Jeremy's Instagram: "Kelly here: Eleven hours and 45 minutes. They've only just worked out that this is really bloody stupid."

Nearing 11pm both Colin and Jeremy were in the tent taking a break and both looked pretty shattered. Jeremy was still on schedule for his 500km, and Colin was currently leading the 50-59 category. It began to rain at about this point, and they headed out for another stint. The plan for Jeremy was to have a quick rinse off at the beach shower on the foreshore and go to sleep around midnight in the Captiva, getting up around 5am to start riding again. Because he was so far ahead of schedule he decided to drive to Cathy's place and take advantage of a hot shower. I left the foreshore a bit before he did, pedalling back to Cathy's on Jeremy's mum's shopper bike. I'd asked Jeremy's dad to bring it down earlier in the day; I'd realised his parents were probably not going to be keen on copying my intended midnight finish and 5am start, and if Jeremy was going to sleep in the Captiva while I slept at the house, unless I borrowed his Mum and Dad's car I was going to be strapped for transport back to the foreshore.

When I woke up I immediately checked the online tracker for what lap Jeremy and Colin were on. Colin had evidently lost his lead overnight but I thought that Jeremy was out on his bike already. I had a shower and then checked the tracker again - yep, Jeremy was increasing his lap count, but Colin was stationary. I quickly got changed, had my breakfast while I listened to the rain pouring down and then pedaled back to the foreshore. I got to the tent to see Colin sat in one camping chair with his feet on the other and a couple of blankets wrapped around him. I gently called his name several times, to no response, and tried a bit louder and a bit sharper. He stirred, and looked blearily at me, not really registering anything in his fog. It took him a couple of minutes to work out how to speak, and he explained that he'd taken quite ill in the night, and had decided to sit down for a while to see if he could manage to keep some fluids down.

The night before I'd prepaid the coffee man next door for a coffee for Jeremy, so he could have a strong hot coffee first thing if he wanted, so I went and ordered that and also got Colin a weak black tea. While I was waiting for the order I saw Colin, now standing, cannoning off the tent walls and wobbling around while he tried to set up his bike for the day. He was absolutely wrecked, but at that point he was still second in the 50-59 category, and determined not to lose his place. He kept the black tea down, and was slowly coming to a slightly higher function. Colin didn't get a driver's license until he was well over 40 years of age - his transport was almost solely by bicycle (technically also by submarine, as he was in the Australian Navy for over twenty years), so I thought as he pedaled off he'd actually probably be more stable on a bicycle than on his feet. Jeremy later said that he'd co-opted a few people to keep coming and checking on Colin, and was himself pulling in regularly to make sure that he could see the rise and fall of Colin's chest while he slept.

The morning wore on and the rain poured down; everyone was just grimly determined, pedalling lap after lap. Colin wouldn't take anything in except for plain water and kept checking to see where he was on the leader board. His lead seemed steady at about 3-4 laps for most of the morning. Jeremy had his head down just pedalling on and on. He was still on schedule for 500km, but he wasn't going to get much beyond that.

We were coming up on 11am and Jeremy did it. About half an hour before the finish he made his target of five hundred kilometres. He'd slowly lost speed over the 24 hours and by this point wasn't able to make the calculations of what speed to keep at in order to make his goal, so as he'd pass and ask what lap he was on, we'd keep telling him to just keep his speed over 20km/h. Sometimes there would be a lag between the online tracker and reality, and other times you'd want to say to Jeremy "you're on lap 240", because technically he was, but in 100 metres he'd be on lap 241, so it was easier to just say "Keep pedalling over 20km/h!"

I'd told Erik Mellegers, the event MC and owner of the Collie Crank'n Cycles bike shop that Jeremy's goal was five hundred kilometres. I knew Jeremy would want a secondary verification, and Erik was reading distances off the official timing and recording system. As Jez crossed the line marking the end of the lap that took him over 500km, I gulped air and tried to stop crying with pride while Erik announced "Jeremy Savage! Five hundred plus kilometres!"

Jez threw his arm high in the air, and kept pedalling Fred, going around the corner, having finally met his goal, with another 30 or so minutes spare.

515.1 kilometres.

I have no great enthusiasm about running, because I have no speed, which means that those time goals that I would push myself to reach just become discouraging to me. I have no speed because I don't train, but I don't train because I have no enthusiasm. And on.

It should be noted that while I say I have no enthusiasm,  it doesn't mean that I've stopped running. I still run, I still exercise. I run to be social, not to compete. I go to darkrun on Tuesday evening, I go to parkrun on Saturday morning, and then on Sunday I'll do something - currently it's been Masters Athletics, or I'll go for a run locally somewhere.

In an attempt to generate mojo, I have taken to running on a Thursday night - Jeremy and Vince meet at the bike shop on the other side of the river and run around 7-10km, so I run from work to the bike shop, meet Jeremy there and then we drive back into the city to collect my things from work. I've decided to use the run to do a half arsed fartlek session, which has been surprisingly enjoyable.

Tomorrow I've got a work thing on until about 7pm so it won't be convenient to run after work.  Instead I'm planning on going out at stupid o'clock in the morning and running a few laps of the oval near our house. Unfortunately it's been ridiculously cold recently, and with an overnight minimum of 4.C, this will seriously test my attempts at mojo generation.