Breaknecking - Knowing When to 'Buzz The Tower' (and when not to)

I'd done a lot of taking myself to bed over the last few weeks and was pretty sure I was almost lost forever (how is it 29 years since Top Gun?) but the second I started to feel better, I saw the green light and just went for it. Like a MIG in a tailspin. Flying so fast with absolutely no idea that I was going to need to eject from my own life and float back under a re-educated, more sustainable parachute.

I logged back on to my dormant runkeeper account, picked a new route to explore every day, entered a local 10km nine-weeks away and started clocking up the miles.  I started at 8km and built to 14km within the space of ten days.  None of this come-out-of-recovery-walk-jog-walk stuff. 

I swam length after hypnotic length in the outdoor pool at the gym and had to remind myself to get out after 50.

I threw my clunking brain into gear and chewed through Coriolanus and the 2500 word essay I needed to do for my English Masters, compressing two months' work into a week.  I wrote through the night, missed the deadline by 17 minutes and submitted it into the ether. Done.

I drove to Essex. I drove to the Lake District.  I drove to Cornwall and back in a day- a round-trip of 13 hours. What do you mean I should have broken the journey?

I tried to catch up with as many friends as possible.  I coffee'd, I lunched, I hen-partied, I musicalled, I even old-peoples'-home-visited. I just did it. Didn't cross my mind not to.

And I crashed. 

The problem with having been in the military is that you have no off-switch.  Living life at 100mph is perfectly normal, taking it up to 150mph on the Nurburgring might raise an eyebrow; driving home from Germany postings in a tax-free sports car at 120mph on the Autobahn is routine; flying through the Crossed Swords in Baghdad in a Puma helicopter merely an experimental detour; getting dumped out in the green zone in a cloud of diplomatic dust with only a mobile phone and a pistol because some guy called Tony Blair needs a lift, mildly inconvenient; pulling the duvet over your head when people trying to kill you are mortaring the f*** out of the compound you're in, mildly irritating.  That was life.  Fast. Fearless. Fun.

Except now I wasn't well and I needed to slow right down and listen to my mind and body.  I needed to just stop. Stop work, stop over-thinking, stop over-training, stop over-stretching myself in every area of my life.  I worked with the psychologist to understand 'pacing' and  set a reasonable scale of expectation and activity for myself.  I needed to find out what I could cope with, what were my tolerance levels - now and in the future?  I needed to understand what most people would understand by 'gentle exercise'.  That could be a 10km walk over a few hours in my mind- no, 12 minutes walking was apparently 'gentle'.  Wow- I needed to completely recalibrate.  I started to pull things out of my diary- not just because there was too much in there, but because I just couldn't manage.  I postponed, I cancelled, I prioritised, I streamlined, I left my trainers on the doormat. I found my parachute.

It sounds silly but I learnt the power of setting boundaries, reminding myself that I have choices and that I am in control.  I don't have to buzz the control tower every day to prove that I am....what?  It's ok, just to be me. No need for speed.