I'm 22 and it's late at night when the phone goes. Ten minutes later I'm driving to Southampton General Hospital. My dad is seriously ill.
A week later he's gone. Bone cancer, at just 50, and none of us had even known he was ill.
I decide there and then that I'm going to chase my dreams and make things happen. Life's too short to wait. And I do chase them. It just doesn't turn out the way I expect.
All the shiny things
Over the next few years I get plenty of stuff. The things I thought success looked like. None of them make me happy, because none of them can fill the gap I'm trying to fill with them.
And slowly, without me noticing, my health goes. I put on a lot of weight. I'm ill more often than I'm well. I'm depressed. Nothing happens in one go. It's a little worse every year.
Then I start watching my own children and see history getting ready to repeat itself. I honestly wonder if I'll make it to 40. That's when something has to change.
Your rituals are your results
The things you do every day, without thinking, decide where you end up. Change the habits and in time the results change. In time being the important bit.
It works both ways. Someone who's lost weight starts having cake every afternoon and a takeaway on the way home, and sooner or later it comes back. No single slice did it. The habit did.
I made a decision to take my health back and stop waiting for a doctor to fix me. And a decision only counts once you start acting on it. So I studied, I got qualified in a few things, and I went from getting out of breath on the stairs to running ultra marathons. My first one was 107 miles. If I was going to do it, I thought, I may as well find out what I was capable of.
None of that happened fast. It took years of small, boring, daily choices. The full story of my first long race is in What a baseball cap taught me on my first ultra.
Nine women, one month
There's an old line I love. You can't make a baby in a month by getting nine women pregnant. Some things just take the time they take.
Looking back from 2026, the changes I'm most grateful for were all slow. Most weeks it felt like nothing was happening. Then one day I looked up and everything was different. It's the same thing I found when I thought about the difference a decade makes.
Pick one small daily habit that would move you towards something you want, and do it every day for the next month without checking the results. Then look back at where it's got you.
First published July 2017.
