Jog On

Jog On Plot Summary

Introduction

The sound of shoes hitting pavement echoes through the early morning darkness. A woman runs alone through empty streets, her breath visible in the cold air. With each step, something inside her loosens—the tight grip of anxiety gradually releasing its hold. She isn't running toward anything in particular. She's running away from the thoughts that have imprisoned her for years. This is a story about transformation through motion—about finding freedom in the simple act of placing one foot in front of another. The author guides us through her remarkable journey from debilitating anxiety to discovered strength, showing how running became not just physical exercise but a powerful tool for mental health. Through raw honesty and thoughtful reflection, she illustrates how movement can break the cycle of fear, panic, and isolation. This narrative isn't about athletic achievement or competitive success; it's about how moving our bodies can help heal our minds. As readers follow her path from anxious immobility to joyful motion, they'll discover insights that might illuminate their own journeys toward mental wellness and self-acceptance.

Chapter 1: The Collapse: When Life Falls Apart

She lay on the floor of her sitting room, watching her husband's feet walking quickly toward the door. Even in that moment of collapse, her mind raced ahead to what was coming—the unbearable sadness, awkward questions, and embarrassment that follow a marriage breakdown. The actual moment of heartbreak was astonishingly brief. It wasn't the drawn-out disintegration she might have imagined as an adult, with love and comfort slowly breaking off over years until nothing remained. It happened in a flash, taking her completely by surprise, giving her no time to prepare. Someone stood across from her, looked directly into her eyes, and told her they were leaving, that they no longer loved her, that she was not enough. In that moment, she thought: "This is when I'm going to die. I can't possibly get through this." Something in her body had savagely ruptured, and all she could think to do was lie on the floor and wait for the inevitable tunnel of light. The shock felt brutally physical, but strangely, it was also the easy part. Because sooner or later, she realized she wasn't going to die. She couldn't even stare blankly at the carpet for too long because she had to pick up kids from school, or walk the dog, or go to work. Maybe she just needed to pee. Her pain didn't even stand up to the most mundane demands of an idle Monday. After this unwelcome realization, she saw the future clearly: she would stumble through this moment. But it would take such a long time. Heartbreak is brief; the way out of it is interminable, and sometimes you resent even having to try. Even as she lay there, she knew she would shortly have to get off the floor. She knew that with the right coping skills, it might be OK in the end. But she also knew something else—unlike most adults, she didn't have any coping skills. Anxious even as a very small child, she had let her worries fester, take control, and dominate her life. Mental health problems had stunted her growth, leaving her too scared to take on challenges. One week into her newly single life, she had the idea to run. There's a moment in "The Catcher in the Rye" when Holden Caulfield runs across the school playing fields and explains it away by saying: "I don't even know what I was running for—I guess I just felt like it." Maybe she was just fed up with feeling so miserable, or perhaps she already knew she had to try something different, but that day she just felt like running. She put on some old leggings and a T-shirt and walked to a dark alleyway thirty seconds from her flat. It fitted two important criteria: just near enough to the safety of home, and just quiet enough that nobody would laugh at her. The transformation began with those first awkward steps—three minutes of running in the dark, slowly, not all at once. Three minutes more than she had ever run in her life. Out of breath with a stitch in her side, she already felt better than she had in years. That was enough for a first attempt. What she didn't know then was that this small act of putting one foot in front of another would become her salvation—a way to outrun the anxiety that had controlled her life, and to discover a new path forward through grief, fear, and uncertainty.

Chapter 2: First Steps: Beginning the Journey from Darkness

The first run lasted just three minutes in the dark, slowly and not all in one go. It was three minutes more than she had ever run in her life. Out of breath with a stitch in her side, she already felt better than she had in years. That was enough for a first attempt. Now she could go back home and have a cry. Or some wine. To her own surprise, she didn't leave it there. She wanted to, it had felt pretty grim, but something in her overrode all her internal excuses. She went back to that same alley the next day. And the day after that. Those first few attempts were all pathetic really. A few seconds, shuffle, stop. Wait. Go again. Freeze if a person emerged from the shadows. Feel ridiculous. Carry on anyway. Always in the dark, always in secret, as if she was somehow transgressing. Throughout her life, if she couldn't do something well on the first attempt, she was prone to quit almost immediately. It was embarrassingly clear that she was not running well, or getting better at it. And yet, much to her own quiet disbelief, she carried on. She carried on trudging up and down the dark alleyway for two weeks. And when she finally felt bored rather than just merely terrified or out of breath, she went a little bit further. For the first couple of months, she stuck to the roads closest to her flat—her brain always looking for the escape route—looping around quiet streets, and cringing when cars passed by. She was slow, sad and angry. But two things were becoming clear to her. The first was that when she ran, she didn't feel quite so sad. Her mind would quieten down—some part of her brain seemed to switch off, or at least cede control for a few minutes. She wouldn't think about her marriage, or her part in its failure. She wouldn't wonder if her husband was happy, or out on a great date, or just not thinking about her at all. The relief this gave her was immense. The second thing, which was even more valuable, was that she noticed she wasn't feeling so anxious. Soon enough, she was reaching parts of the city that she hadn't been able to visit in years, especially alone. She meant, she's not talking the centre of Soho and its bustling crowds, but within a month she was able to run through the markets of Camden without feeling like she would faint or break down. She could not have done this if she'd been walking—she'd tried so many times but her anxiety would break through, palms sweating and looming panic taking over. By concentrating on the rhythm of her feet striking the pavement, she wasn't obsessing over her breathing, or the crowds, or how far she was from home. She could be in an area her brain had previously designated as "unsafe," and not feel like she was going to faint. It was miraculous to her. Joyce Carol Oates once described how running enables her writing, positing that it helps as "the mind flies with the body." She took that to mean that your body takes your brain along for the ride. Your mind is no longer in the driving seat. You're concentrating on the burn in your legs, the swing of your arms. You notice your heartbeat, the sweat dripping into your ears, the way your torso twists as you stride. Once you're in a rhythm, you start to notice obstacles in your way, or people to avoid. You see details on buildings you'd never noticed before. You anticipate the weather ahead of you. Your brain has a role in all of this, but not the role it is used to. Her mind, accustomed to frightening her with endless "what if" thoughts, or happy to torment her with repeated flashbacks to her worst experiences, simply could not compete with the need to concentrate while moving fast. She'd tricked it, or exhausted it, or just given it something new to deal with. It was as if waves were repeatedly crashing over her, giving her no time to recover before the next assault. Running gave her a break from that constant barrage—a precious respite from the prison of her own mind.

Chapter 3: The Body Speaks: Physical Manifestations of Mental Health

Running with grief is different to everyday running, when you're chasing a high, or seeking a rush. After the death of a beloved friend, her running became all-punishing. She would run longer, faster, in the rain, uphill. She was running to push out sadness by inviting in physical hurt. Legs burning, lungs working overtime, heart pumping. She got no physical rush from it, no high and no sense of achievement. She just did it to do something. At first, she wasn't entirely sure that it was helping at all. Unlike her early running, where she felt better immediately after a jog, and felt her negative feelings lift a little bit more each time, she didn't feel much relief. But the physical unpleasantness of hard runs slightly negated the mental stuff. This "putting pain on pain to feel better" strategy isn't unique. In a 2017 paper by researchers from Cardiff University titled "Selling Pain to the Saturated Self," the authors looked at people who completed a hard physical challenge—the Tough Mudder—to try and understand what pain does to us. The Tough Mudder is a series of twenty-five brutal exercises—running through a bog or risking electric shock. The authors wanted to know why people would actively put themselves forward for this kind of pain, rather than run screaming from it. From interviews with Tough Mudder participants, they found that physical discomfort seemed to suspend people's usual brain activity. "When pain floods their consciousness, participants seem unable to develop complex thoughts. Pain temporarily suspends the reflexive project of the self." So by running, and feeling it in every part of her body, she was able to shut off the feelings of grief that had enveloped her. Not for long, and not forever, but enough to see some light. As the Cardiff study showed: "Pain enables a temporary erasure of the self. When flooding individuals with unpleasantness, pain momentarily erases the burdens of identity and facilitates a distinctive type of escape." Erasing the burdens of identity—that nails it. Life is hard, the emotions we have to deal with can be too complex for us to handle. Sometimes you want to shrug off the hardships of being a human, if just for a few minutes. Going running is not an attempt to pretend life is not hard; it's a break, a lift, a pause. Chris started running when he was faced with the impossibly awful news that both his parents were terminally ill. "Dad had dementia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer. Mum had motor neurone disease, and lost the power of speech. She was meant to be looking after Dad. It didn't work out well." In a bid to retain some semblance of control, Chris told her that he fell upon running. "I couldn't help the situation much, beyond organising carers, hospitals and so on, but I definitely could make sure I took care of myself, and reduce the chances of me ending up in a similar position with my kids. Partly fear of that, probably. It also got me out of the house, so a constantly changing scenery helped put distance between me and my worries." Running helped Chris throughout this sad and stressful time in his life—both physically and mentally. "It distracts you a bit because your body is doing something. I think that slows down parts of your mind, and if your lungs are bursting or your legs want to stop, other thoughts have to wait their turn. Only the really important things get thought about, so that helps you sort the wheat from the chaff. It prioritises things, and helps to organise thoughts." The physical manifestations of mental pain—tight chest, racing heart, shallow breathing—meet their match in running's ability to normalize these sensations, giving them purpose and meaning. Where anxiety makes the body feel like a battleground, running transforms it into a vehicle for release and healing.

Chapter 4: Breaking Barriers: Pushing Through Panic

A month after her marriage ended, she had cried buckets, drunk whatever wine she could get her hands on, smoked enough cigarettes to age her a decade, and run further than she had ever thought she could. She had run in torrential rain, in the dark, and she'd run when she was drunk, tired, weepy or furious. Sometimes all at once. She'd bought proper trainers and she'd downloaded a running tracker. For the first time in a long time, she felt in control of something, however small. She didn't need to rely on anyone else to run, and she didn't feel like a feeble wreck when she did it. She had successfully formed a habit. She was hooked. As her confidence grew, she pushed herself further. She had rational evidence that she'd be OK to go a little further, since she'd been testing out her limits, and finding them remarkably flexible. She looked up monuments, museums and historic buildings that she'd never visited and mapped her running routes around them. This often meant going through the busiest parts of town, where tourists dawdle and people rush about, where cars honk and everything sounds too loud. Things that she avoided like the plague. But when she was on foot, in a rhythm, using up all her excess adrenaline, it felt exciting instead of scary. Her first running adventure was to the site of Thomas Cromwell's house. She had recently finished reading Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" and had spent a lot of time googling more details of his life. She found out he once lived on Austin Friars in the City of London, an area now famous for its glass-covered buildings and bankers in expensive suits. She looked up a vague route online and headed out. She had no idea how long the run would take her, so she ditched all plans for her Saturday. She started slowly, aware that whenever she'd kicked off running fast, she'd lost all energy within minutes. She shuffled down the Holloway Road, an arterial line running through north London, looking in the windows of old-fashioned hair salons, shops selling flashy phone covers and cafes where elderly ladies sat outside having coffee and cigarettes. She was whizzing along now. Picking up the pace, listening to music as she wove through people walking along in the sunshine. She reached Farringdon, and the crowds thinned out. She passed an old fire station, a railway line and a centre for children who stutter. She ran through the old meat market in Smithfield, and stopped to see a beautiful church hidden away behind new buildings. She needed that stop, she was aching by now, and sweat was soaking through her top. But she pushed on, running past St Paul's Cathedral, a place she hadn't visited since she was a child. There were bells ringing, and people gathering on the grand steps outside. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the Millennium Bridge – previously known as the wobbly bridge, which she hadn't crossed since its shaky early days. She decided to detour. She was feeling bouncy now, the runner's rush had kicked in and her legs weren't so tired all of a sudden. Off she went across the bridge, getting about halfway before she had to stop and look around her. She was almost smacked across the face by the beauty and grandeur of the city she lived in—a city she had been scared of for more than a decade. She had dreamed of escaping it, of living quietly in the country where she could avoid all the rush, the noise, the crowds and her own fear. But here she was, alone, standing on a bridge, seeing the city where she had been born in a new light. The city wasn't out to get her. It wasn't looming and cold, it was light and large and calm. The river ran underneath her, and for once, she wasn't thinking about the worst case scenario—the bridge collapsing and plunging her into the icy water. Running taught her how not to be scared. From pounding the streets and tiring her brain out, her long-engrained phobias and fears about things like terrifying Tube journeys gradually receded until they were just a fading bruise, and not a fresh injury. She knew that her feet could take her places, and get her home too. Starting something from scratch, and following it through, was something she'd rarely been able to do before. That gave her a growing confidence, even early on in her running life. And that confidence gave her faith in her own body again. She was the route planner, the driver and the passenger. Her brain had to shut up when she was busy deciding which road to go down, or when she was concentrating hard on getting her breathing even.

Chapter 5: Social Connection: Finding Community in Solitary Motion

Even as she lay on the floor of her sitting room, watching her husband's feet walking quickly towards the door, she was already thinking about what was to come. When a marriage breaks down, there will be unbearable sadness, awkward questions, sometimes embarrassment. The feeling of isolation was overwhelming. Despite friends rallying around her, the loss of her marriage left a void that seemed impossible to fill. Running became her solitary pursuit, but paradoxically, it connected her to the world around her in ways she hadn't experienced before. During her lonely runs, she began to notice details she'd previously overlooked—the group of mothers with buggies in the local cafe, the man who drinks cider outside the fire station, the rug shop owner who carefully repairs his wares on the pavement outside. After years of wallowing inside her head, she was facing outwards. When she ran, she would feel connected with the world around her—part of something larger than just her neuroses. With every strike of her foot, she would calm down, feel less manic about the silence in her flat, realize that there was a world around her that she wanted to engage with and could, whenever she liked. For those with physical disabilities, the challenge of finding community through movement can be even greater. According to a survey by Sport England, just 18 per cent of those with a disability or long-term limiting illness take part in sport each week. Gyms can feel intimidating and inaccessible. But there are organizations working to change this. The Activity Alliance has a helpful section on their website which can help people find local gyms that will cater to their specific needs. They understand that everyone should have access to the benefits of movement and community that exercise can provide. The sense of community that running with others provides ranked highly with participants in a study by Glasgow Caledonian University that looked at whether running can make you happier. The questionnaire used the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire, and asked people to answer questions using a rating between 1 (unhappy) and 6 (extremely happy). Parkrun participants emerged with an average of 4.4, compared to the general population, who scored an average 4. The support and sociable elements of running with others was invaluable to many respondents. Sara, who suffered with postnatal depression after the birth of her first child, told the author that running with a friend provided some light in the dark. Someone who would pick her up and force her out, someone who pushed her on and kept her going when she might not have bothered herself. "I'm quite a solo runner, and a bit of a hermit, so I actually like running by myself and get a lot of benefit from that, but at the same time I know the fact that I had one friend who kept pushing me (in a nice way) to run was probably a key part of my recovery that one time," she explained. "I might've done it myself eventually, but she certainly speeded things along. And, of course, having meaningful connections with other people is a big part of sustaining good mental health." Connection isn't limited to running with others—even solitary runners found themselves more connected to their surroundings, to nature, and to their communities. The rhythmic movement creates a bridge between the internal world of thoughts and feelings and the external world of sights, sounds, and other people. This connection helps combat the isolation that so often accompanies anxiety and depression, creating pathways back to a shared human experience that mental illness often obscures. Through movement, we rediscover not just ourselves, but our place in the world around us.

Chapter 6: Transformative Power: How Running Reshapes Mental Landscapes

She's running with her ex-boyfriend. They broke up when she was twenty-one, but they've kept in touch sporadically. Nobody broke anyone's heart, they were just young and she in particular had no idea how to have a relationship. Marios has embarked on a mission that seems ludicrous—he's going to run through jungle in South America, doing six marathons in six days for charity. At high altitude. He's not really much of a runner, but a career in mixed martial arts means he's fit as anyone can be. She doesn't think he loves to run, though, not really. So she offered to go with him, and now they're pounding up a hill, urging each other onwards. Back when they dated, she was a sad and overweight girl prone to spontaneous bouts of crying, who had a constant urge to eat family bags of crisps. He was a fitness fanatic who weighed his meals and took the skin off chicken because it was needlessly fatty. They were a weird match. Now their physicality has almost met in the middle, and she has no problem pacing him. She's entranced by how much he's making her laugh, despite the cold and the stitch she gets halfway in. They race over Hampstead Heath, and push on down through Swiss Cottage and onto the Finchley Road, passing their old haunts and talking about all the stupid fights they used to have. It's a run through memories, those which make them laugh but also which make her feel strangely detached from her past. It's odd to remember being so deeply lost and unhappy, as though it was all happening to someone else. She feels like a completely different person, someone who found an even keel by luck. Running has taught her how not to be scared. From pounding the streets and tiring her brain out, her long-engrained phobias and fears have gradually receded. She knows that her feet can take her places, and get her home too. She sometimes forgets just how bound up she was before she started running, and writing it all down has been strange as she revisits just how miserable it all was. She recently went to see her wonderful former therapist, mainly because she missed chatting to him. He reminded her that when she'd first come to see him, just as her marriage was crumbling, she was barely able to leave the house. That low place seems far away now, even though she knows that living with mental illness means never getting too complacent. For Nicola, who was diagnosed with PTSD as an adult after being sexually abused, running became a lifeline. "I left the RAF in 2013, watched the London Marathon in 2015 and decided I would like to do it and take part, so I entered the ballot for it and started to train. I found that when I started to run it helped me to relax and be more happy in myself, and the more I did the better I felt. I managed to move to my own home and found a decent job—everything seemed to click into place." Since 2015, Nicola has completed over 95 races—anything from a mile to a hundred kilometers. "Apart from running to help my PTSD, collecting medals seems to have become an obsession," she admits. For those who have experienced trauma or loss, running offers a particularly powerful means of reclaiming agency. Michael and Rachel's son was stillborn. "Ninety-nine per cent of people would stop and ask how Rachel was," Michael explained. "No one would ask if I was OK. I would be told how I had to be strong for her. And so my mental health became affected. I smiled on the outside and broke on the inner. Simple tasks became a chore and I found myself wanting to hide away so I could cry in secret. Almost ashamed." Michael found running gave him an outlet. "I was always generally fit from my RAF days and I was asked to take part in a relay race three years after we lost Kyle. It gave me a taste of something new. I found I could put my music on and take my frustration out via my feet. It gave me an outlet I had never had before." The transformative power of running lies not just in its physical benefits but in how it reshapes our mental landscapes. It creates new neural pathways, both literally and figuratively. Where anxiety once carved deep grooves of worry and fear, running establishes alternative routes—paths of strength, capability, and possibility. The terrain of the mind, once dominated by the jagged peaks of panic and the deep valleys of depression, gradually transforms into a more navigable landscape—one where we can find our way forward even when challenges arise.

Chapter 7: Setbacks and Sustainability: Maintaining Balance in Recovery

She ran around Edinburgh one day. Leaving her friend and her phone at the hotel, she decided to wing it. She set off directionless down the main shopping street, gawping at the castle, which was bathed in red light. Cobbles felt wobbly under her feet and she could sense her ankles were in danger of rolling. But she focused on the road, and got into a rhythm. This was the first run without her phone—her safety net. She'd never even been to the shops without it—just in case, just in case, just in case of what? She didn't know the city, and normally that would have made her more nervous, but today she felt freed by that knowledge. She was all alone and it felt fine. Maybe more than fine. She felt giddy abandon. Despite all the progress she'd made, she would still experience moments of setback. Once she was running across a park, about 10k in, during a brutal summer which had given them no rain. She had been pushing herself on recent excursions, going faster, longer, taking fewer breaks. BANG! She leapt over a dip in the ground, and her knee was screaming. She hopped on one leg and clutched at her knee, as though a frantic rub would make the pain go away. But it didn't, and she was forced to hobble home. She had "runner's knee," which she tried to view as some kind of horrible badge of honor, and not as a catastrophe which would derail all her progress. Exercises were prescribed, stretches, low-impact moves. She stared forlornly at her trainers when she set off to the swimming baths to do some lame doggy-paddle. Like her, Sara has experienced mental-health issues which have cropped up more than once. She's also had to accept that these illnesses don't always go away fully—and she too uses running as a tool to fight off potential episodes, while also realizing that it can only do so much. "I was first diagnosed with postnatal depression in 2004, I was off work for six months. Since then I've had another four major periods of depression, two leading to more time off work. The last couple have been accompanied by quite severe anxiety as well." Sara used yoga and t'ai chi after her first bout of postnatal depression, and she knew that exercise helped with her symptoms. She also recognized that stopping it usually signaled a low point: "When I stop doing regular exercise it's a sure sign that things are starting to dip again, and then it's just a downward spiral." She took up running, and loved it almost immediately: "Within about a week I got quite addicted and probably ran too much without really knowing how to support my body through that." Sara injured her knee—please read the tips for getting started so that you don't end up with a similar injury. She had another big episode of anxiety and depression shortly afterwards, and felt unable to venture outside the house without her husband, so the running fell by the wayside. But Sara missed it, and running found a way to lure her back. A friend, who understood her mental-health problems, scooped her up and took her out. "She was an amazing support and just seemed to know how to deal with me. She used to come to my door, pick me up in her car, drive us to a remote hillside or wood somewhere, and we'd run for as long as I could, then she'd drop me back home again. It was a real lifesaver." Every run she does is different, even after all this time. Some are short, to shake off a burgeoning hangover. Some are long, and whimsical, and she keeps going just because she can. Sometimes she can go fast, and she feels tons of energy pulsing through her body. Occasionally, she gets bursts of great joy and runs down hills mentally screaming "wheeeeee!" like a kid. Often, the runs she does are hard—but that's OK too, she knows that they still matter. And every time she runs, she gets something from it. A break from the day, or time for herself, or she sees something beautiful, works through a problem, sloughs off a niggling worry. Sustainability in recovery requires finding this balance—understanding that setbacks are inevitable, but not permanent, and that the path forward isn't a straight line but a winding road with ups and downs. Running taught her that progress isn't about perfection but persistence. You fall, you get up. You encounter obstacles, you find a way around them. The resilience built through physical effort translates to emotional resilience—the knowledge that you can face difficulties and keep moving forward, one step at a time.

Summary

Through the simple act of putting one foot in front of another, we find a pathway not just through physical space but through the tangled landscapes of our minds. The author's journey from the floor of her sitting room after her marriage collapsed to running through the streets of Edinburgh without her phone demonstrates how movement can transform not just our bodies but our relationship with anxiety, grief, and fear. Each step becomes an act of reclamation—taking back territory once surrendered to mental illness. The power of running lies not in its ability to erase our problems, but in how it changes our relationship to them. It provides a container for our pain, a channel for our energy, and a connection to the world around us when isolation threatens to overwhelm. The stories shared—from Sara fighting postnatal depression to Michael honoring his stillborn son through marathons—reveal how movement creates meaning even in our darkest moments. As one runner put it: "It reminds me I'm alive, I'm here, and I'm connected to this world." This connection proves to be the true gift of joyful motion—not escaping our lives but engaging with them more fully, with greater resilience and hope. The path to freedom isn't found in avoiding our difficulties but in moving through them, step by step, breath by breath, discovering along the way that we are stronger than we knew.

About Author

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Bella Mackie

Vogue columnist. Author of best-selling novel “How to Kill Your Family."

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