How It Began
I had a fairly normal upbringing: no divorced parents, no major trauma experienced as a child. By all accounts, I had a great childhood, which I feel grateful for, as I now know that’s not the case for everyone. Until my teenage years, I had no real complaints. Well, in hindsight I didn’t, I’m sure as a kid I relentlessly tortured my parents with complaints of being bored or wanting whatever new thing my friends had.
I was fortunate that both my parents were keen runners, and so, as a young child, I was dragged, kicking and screaming, to a running club and forced to exercise. Looking back on it, this is hands down the best thing my parents have ever done for me because it gave me a foundation of regular exercise at a young age that would come to be helpful in my renaissance with exercise in my mid-20s.
In my teenage years, I suffered a lot of the same stresses as everyone else: insecurity, peer pressure, the usual. By age 15, I was dipping my toe into the underage drinking scene.
From the age of 16 to 23, I was drinking every single weekend and probably for the entire weekend. These years, unfortunately, ingrained in me the association of alcohol with any and all activities: just finished work—drink, night out—drink, family get-together—drink, long car journey (where I wasn’t driving)—drink, boredom of any context—drink. I’ll be honest, I had some great times and still have some great memories. The issue was that it created an association very early on of alcohol as a go-to for anything I was doing that wasn’t work. Until the age of 19, I’d managed to walk a tightrope between exercising and drinking in equal measures so that the positives and negatives were generally balancing one another out. Unfortunately, from 19 to 21, this was not the case. Like a lot of my peers, I was fully in the nightlife culture and everything that came with it, so my routine of exercising went right out the window. This was the beginning of a downward spiral, and one I would not become fully aware of until it was too late.
By 21, I’d started to experience heart palpitations and panic attacks, which to an uneducated person on such things as I was, felt like I was having a heart attack. This sent my mind into a complete meltdown, and without putting it too lightly, if I’d been sectioned at this point in my life, it wouldn’t have been inappropriate. I’d be confident to say that I had more panic attacks in one year than there were days in that year. I was losing my mind, and no one around me really had any idea of how to help. The panic attacks became a daily occurrence, and it wasn’t long until the escape of sleep was ruined as I began to experience them then also. I won’t go into the depths of what this was like, but to put it plainly, I was in a terrible place. I remember my mum asking me to imagine how I wanted to feel in one year’s time, and happiness wasn’t even on my radar. I just didn’t want to feel the unbearable mental torture I was currently experiencing.
At this time, I’d just completed my engineering apprenticeship, and even amongst the madness of my mind, I recognized that I probably had to get out of my surroundings and try to sort myself out. I decided to travel to Asia for six months before moving to Australia. Many people I know who did a similar thing speak fondly of the places they went to and the friends they made. This was not my experience. I spent most of this time battling the demons in my mind and trying to figure out how to become a semi normal human being again.
Something I realized at this time is that you may change your surroundings; however, you’re still the same person with the same mind no matter where you are in the world, and so you can’t just move somewhere new and all your problems will be solved.
During this time away, I was slowly able to begin reducing the frequency of my negative habits and feel the occasional glimmer of hope that I was making some progress. The biggest breakthrough came when I went on a six-month sobriety kick and realized the effect that the "hangxiety" I was putting myself through every weekend was having on my brain. I won’t say that it was all plain sailing from this point onwards, but I was able to link the benefits of not drinking and exercising regularly to the small improvements I was beginning to feel. I came back to the UK still very much a work in progress but I was beginning to recognise what decisions I was making that were good for me and what weren’t.
Around this time I’d begun to watch a lot of motivational videos on YouTube while working out, and more often than not, they included clips of people completing IRONMANs. I remember thinking how insane it was that anyone could do something like an IRONMAN. I’d sit and daydream, pretending I could ever be like them, though in reality, I had absolutely no belief that I ever could be. I had always liked the idea of triathlons though and being able to run, swim, and cycle, so on a whim I began looking at entry level triathlon races in my local area, and that’s where I found the Loch Lomond Beastie Triathlon…
The above is a very brief summary of my background and much more information than I’d normally share in a first-time conversation. However, I feel it’s important to outline where my mind was before I began any of the endurance events I’ve gone on to do. Often, people comment on not being super fit or having a background in endurance sports but I hope that by sharing this and how bad a place I was in, it shows that you don’t need either of those things to pursue such endeavors.