We all have them right? Those days where something just doesn’t feel quite right but you can’t put your finger on it? Nothing bad has happened but for some reason you just don’t feel yourself and want to hide yourself away from everything. I am sure that most of you that read this will agree, and if you don’t, then I envy you. Today, for some reason was one of those days. Like I said, I don’t know exactly why, but I knew it was coming, but did I do anything about it to try and stop it happening? Of course I didn’t (this is called being your own worst enemy!).

Now I say I don’t know exactly why, but I have some ideas. I have spoken before about how hard I can be on myself (this has been a horrible trait since I was a child) and when things don’t go 100% right or to plan. I seem to go on a self destruct mission. So what went wrong this week? In the grand scheme of things, nothing. But in my perfectionist brain, a lot;

Training. My training hasn’t gone 100% to plan. I had to cut my session short on Tuesday & I missed one of my runs on Wednesday. I know that deep down its because I had a hard week the week before, and didn’t give myself enough time to recover, and that missing one session isn’t the end of the world. I try to be positive and tell myself I am doing the right things and listening to my body, but then the other voice in my head just tells me that I am failure.

Relationships. Now, I do like to keep some areas of my life private, so I am not going into details about this. But to sum it up, a line has been drawn under a difficult few months, and it hurts. Men, you suck (sorry, not sorry).

Work. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love my job and I am so glad I took the plunge to go self employed & set up my coaching business. But, being self employed is hard, and it can also be quite lonely. This week was super busy, which meant that unless I was running, I didn’t really leave the house. Spending day in, day out by yourself can get tough and some days I do miss just the basic social interaction of going into work just to talk to people. I am still so new to this, so I am hoping that I will find the balance to it all soon, because what I have realised is that when I do feel like this, spending a lot of time on your own can make everything feel that little bit worse.

Food. My diet has felt like its been all over the place. I have been very open about this in the past and admitted that last year I became a little too obsessive about the numbers on the scale. Whether it was how much I weighed or how much my food weighed. 99% of the time I am in a much better place with this. I do still weigh out my food, but only to ensure that I am eating enough, rather than restricting myself. But this week, I seem to have lost my way a little bit. And that, on top of my training not going well just builds up the problems in my head.

Then something happened today that hasn’t happened for a long time. I binged. I didn’t go as crazy as I have before, and again I knew it was coming but I couldn’t stop myself going to the cupboard, even thought I knew it would make me feel worse. Bingeing comes in all shapes and sizes. It doesn’t always mean you eat a family size chocolate bar or a share bag of crisps. You just grab what you can and eat it. I don’t keep things like that in my house, because the temptation is too much, but trust me, I will find things to binge on – massive bowls of cereal, spoonfuls of peanut butter, loads of cheese….  so yeah, that happened. BUT I did manage to stop myself before I went too far, and I then took myself out of the situation. I went for a walk into the town centre and distracted myself by walking round Primark for an hour, which obviously meant I spent money too.. whoops.

Racing. Tomorrow is the Winter Run 10k, an event I have been looking forward to for a while, and one which I put out there as one of my goal races for the beginning of the year. I have made no secret about the fact I want to PB, and up until a few days ago, I felt really good about it. Now? Not so much. The missed training sessions, the food, the bingeing, it all adds up and in my head it equals game over. Like I have undone everything over the last year in the last few days. I know it sounds dramatic and even as I am typing this out, I know how ridiculous it sounds. Also, I am not expecting this to really make any sense to anyone, because it doesn’t even really make much sense to me. But perhaps if this is how you feel sometimes, it will make you realise you are not alone.

So yeah, thats pretty much what has been going on in my brain/life the last few days. The weird thing is, overall I am probably the most settled & happy I have been in a long time. But here comes that vicious cycle again, as then it makes me feel guilty that I am feeling like this because of all the other good things in my life… honestly, if I could just turn my brain off sometimes, I would!

I can’t lie, I am nervous about tomorrow, and if the race doesn’t go well, I am worried what affect that will have on my headspace. But, I will just have to cross that bridge & deal with it as best I can if it happens.

But anyway, enough negativity for one evening. Time to eat some pasta, have an early night & hopefully wake up feeling a bit more like my normal self in the morning.

Jordan xxx