Personal
He died at the end of them. This is the only page on this website that is not really about fitness.
My dad was an addict. He was also funny, and clever, and the person who taught me that you can be frightened of something and do it anyway — which is, I understand now, an unbearable thing to have learned from someone who could not do it for himself.
He was in recovery, and then he was not, and then he was again. That is what it actually looks like, whatever people imagine. It is not a story with an arc. It is the same week, repeating, with the volume going up.
In the last five years of his life he did not contact me. Not because he had stopped caring — I know that now with a certainty I did not have then — but because he was terrified of what he would see on my face. He did not want my help. He needed it, and he did not want it, and those two things lived in him at the same time without either one winning.
I carried the guilt of that for a long time. Some days I still do. I have gone over it looking for the moment I should have pushed harder, called again, driven there. And what I have arrived at — slowly, and not on the days when it is bad — is this: shame is the engine of addiction, and the people you love most are the hardest to be seen by. His silence was not a measure of how little I mattered. It was a measure of how much. You cannot reach through a door that someone has locked from the inside because they cannot bear for you to see the room.
I know that. I do not always believe it. Both of those are allowed.
I STARTED RUNNING BECAUSE
I DID NOT KNOW WHERE ELSE
TO PUT ANY OF IT.
That is the honest origin. Not a fitness goal. Not a New Year. I had a quantity of grief that would not fit inside a house, and running was the only thing I found that would take some of it off me for forty minutes.
What happened next surprised me. The pain moved. It went from somewhere I could not reach to somewhere I could — into my feet, my shins, my lungs, the specific misery of an alarm at half five on a wet Tuesday. That is not a metaphor and I am not being poetic about it. Grief with no outlet is unbearable because it is shapeless. Sore feet have a shape. Sore feet end.
And I changed my music. For months I ran with the playlist that had him in it — the songs from the car, the ones he played too loudly, the ones that made me cry somewhere around the second mile. Eventually I stopped. Not because I wanted to forget him. Because I needed the running to be the thing that carried me forward, and that playlist only ever carried me back. Now I run to music that makes me keep going. He gets the memory. The run gets the momentum. I think he would find that funny.
Every long run I do is still for him. That has not faded, and it does not feel like a burden — it feels like the one form of contact still available to me. He could not let me help him while he was here. So I go out three times a week and I do the hard thing anyway, which is what he taught me, and in that specific and slightly strange way he is still teaching me.
If you are reading this because someone you love is in the middle of it, or because you lost them: I am not going to tell you running fixes it. It does not. But it gives the pain a place to go, and a rhythm, and an alarm clock. On the worst days, that has been enough.
What I Am Building Toward
When my dad died I wanted to do something with it, and what I kept coming back to was not addiction services. It was the families. There is an enormous amount of support for the person using, and remarkably little for the people standing next to them — the daughters, the mothers, the partners, the ones who spend years not knowing whether the phone ringing at night is the call.
That instinct turns out to be measurable. Research by Adfam, the leading charity in England for families affected by substance use, found that in the areas able to provide a figure, family support received an average of just 1.58% of local substance misuse budgets — and thirteen local authorities reported spending nothing on it at all. Nothing.
So that is what I am building toward: support for the families. The people who are grieving someone who is still alive, and then grieving them again properly afterwards. It is early days and I do not have it all worked out. But it is the reason I keep running, and one day it will be the reason I am on a marathon start line rather than just training for one.
HE COULD NOT LET ME HELP HIM.
SO I WILL HELP THE ONES LIKE HIM,
AND THE ONES LIKE ME.
If You Want To Do The Same
For your person, whoever they were. Here is the practical part nobody explains.
The Ballot
Essentially a lottery, and a brutal one. For the 2026 London Marathon more than 840,000 people applied for around 17,000 ballot places — roughly a 2% chance. Enter it every year by all means, but do not build a plan around it. If you donate your entry fee when you apply, you go into a second draw as well.
A Charity Place
This is the real route, and the one that fits if you are running for a reason anyway. Charities hold guaranteed places and give them to runners who commit to a fundraising target — typically around £2,000 to £2,500 for London, with a small non-refundable registration fee. You apply directly to the charity, usually the summer before.
Charity Bonds
The system underneath it: charities buy Golden or Silver Bonds from the organisers, guaranteeing them places each year for a fixed term. It was overhauled for 2026 and around 800 new charities came into the scheme — so far more smaller causes hold places than people realise. Ask the charity you care about directly.
Smaller Marathons
London is not the only one, and for a first marathon it may not even be the best one. Manchester, Brighton, Edinburgh, Yorkshire and dozens of smaller races have entries you can simply buy — and you can still fundraise for whoever you like through a JustGiving page. Nobody needs to give you permission to run for someone.
If you are looking for somewhere to start — either for support or as a cause to run for — Adfam works specifically with families affected by someone else’s drinking or drug use. Al-Anon runs family groups across the UK, and Nacoa is a helpline for people affected by a parent’s drinking. I wish I had known all three of those names five years earlier than I did.
EVERY RUN IS STILL FOR HIM.
THAT IS THE WHOLE TRAINING PLAN.
If any of this is close to home for you right now — whether you are the one struggling or the one standing next to them — please do talk to someone. Your GP is a reasonable first door, and Adfam, Al-Anon and Nacoa are all there specifically for the family side of it.