016 ☼ The ghosts of the past

I looked for them and found them, but differently than expected

Welcome to my email newsletter 'Never not [thinking about] running' - a weekly newsletter about running and mental health. If you haven't subscribed yet and you're not sure whether you really want to receive an e-mail from me on every Tuesday, have a look at the archive. Todays newsletter is partly about Kelvin Kiptums death and how that reminded me of my own story.

Sunday, February 12, 2024: On a Kenyan country road, a car steers through tight hairpin bends in the famous runner region and leaves the road for unknown reasons and lands in a tree. Three occupants are on board. Two die, one is seriously injured and taken to hospital. It's the kind of news that you probably read thousands of times a day somewhere in the world. In this case, the deceased were the marathon world record holder Kelvin Kiptum and his coach Gervais Hakizimana. Kiptum catapulted himself to the top of the world marathon rankings in a very short space of time.¹ He was seen as the replacement for Eliud Kipchoge. He was seen as the runner who could run sub-2h in competition and not under laboratory conditions. That will not happen now*.

Thursday, December 24, 1987: An Opel Kadett with two occupants leaves the road on an icy German country road and wraps itself around a tree. One person suffers severe craniocerebral trauma, the other escapes with a concussion and a few marginal injuries. When you see the picture of the car involved in the accident, the concept of a miracle comes to mind. The seriously injured person is my then 19-year-old brother, the other person is my father. Myself - 10 years old - was playing with a friend in the playground that morning when the neighbor's daughter came over and told me that I should go home. My mother wanted to tell me something. Even at the age of 10, you know that nothing good could follow. My life was never going to be the same again and it still haunts me today.

Life repeats itself

As I wrote above, there are thousands of these stories in the world. A life extinguished or irretrievably changed. Surviving relatives and loved ones who are also affected and perhaps haunted forever. I don't want to presume to say how Kelvin Kiptum's relatives feel. I just want to share my story, which I was reminded of just this morning when I read the news about Kiptum. And the crazy thing is that yesterday I was sitting in front of my computer in this exact spot and I wanted to tell this story and what this has to do with me and running and I couldn't find a word for it yesterday. I sat there and I didn't know where to start.

And today I know. As I wrote, that day changed my life and my that of family forever. And I think not for the best. Even before that day, I knew that the happiness and security a child is supposed to experience is not set in stone. From one moment to the next, the world could turn upside down. A few years earlier, my father had a heart attack and I can still see him lying in the hallway at night, my mother panicking and phoning the emergency services, and at the end of this picture I am being pushed into my parents' bedroom where my brothers are looking after me.

Many hospital visits in my childhood

My father jumps from the jaws of death, but it could have turned out differently. A few years later, my mother has a surgery - she was gone for 14 days I think - I can't remember exactly why, but somehow it's engraved in my mind that hospitals aren't that cool, that the world is not as safe as it should be. And then the accident.

My family did everything they could to get my brother fit again. Which for me meant spending long afternoons alone. Always fearing that no one would come home and that I would somehow be forgotten. I'm overwhelmed, nothing is coming together at school and, in addition to my own helplessness, I can see my parents' and brother's exhaustion. I don't want to be a burden and at some point, the helplessness turns into the idea that I have to look after myself. And that's what I did. Until today.

Today or better last week

That was the topic of the last therapy session. The introduction was actually quite soft.

Therapist: "How are you feeling today?"

Me: "Pretty good - I've just been ill for two weeks!"

And then it starts bubbling out of me. That it's really not so bad. I wouldn't be running so much at the moment, but that wouldn't be so dramatic either, after all I'd built enough of a buffer into my training plan for the race in May and that I'd be really proud of it.

The therapist pricks up her ears and asks. "Don't you usually do that?" And I have to admit that I don't usually do that. That running is my "safe space", where I don't feel any fear, where I'm freer than anywhere else, but that I often overextend myself. I don't build in any buffers, but push myself to the limits - not in a positive sense, but by simply overdoing it. And then the conversation goes on and on.

ALF. I really enjoy watching that show today

In the end, I'm the little boy, home alone. I remember sitting on the sofa in the dark in the late afternoon watching ALF. The episode with the giant cockroach. And sitting behind the sofa at some point. Then I turn off the TV and finally think about fleeing to the neighbors in fear. I'm not even sure if I ring the doorbell that day, but no one answers. Oh well. Somehow the giant cockroach was too much. In any case, I can turn into this little boy from one moment to the next and that's pretty crazy. How this moment and this feeling has burned itself into me.

And yes. I actually manage quite well in normal life because I developed very clear survival strategies during my childhood. How I can get by on my own when in doubt, but as an adult, as a person who lives in a family, these are not necessarily good strategies.

Old habits for running?

Even when it comes to running, the strategies I've learned keep getting in the way. I always end up in self-induced overload, followed by a health shutdown and then having to pull myself out of the mess again. Not a particularly good lifestyle and no matter how funny it may sound that I've put together a training plan with lots of breaks, the whole thing is serious. In fact, it's a progress that I've worked hard to achieve over the years. Alone, of course.

So many behaviours that have manifested themselves over the years that now need to be changed and they relate to how I deal with the issue of health, accepting help, recognizing and avoiding excessive demands and also generally closing the topic of the past. And that's why I'm currently undergoing therapy and so far it's going pretty well. I can only recommend it. And I actually wanted to write this down here yesterday, but somehow I couldn't get the hang of it. It sucks that it took a terrible accident to do this and I wish the bereaved all the best for the future.

And as always, I would like to point out at the end that running can be really great for your mental health, but that this is not always the case. Running is no substitute for therapy.

Housekeeping

Only one run to check if I’m able to run again. Nope. Not a good idea. I think I had pretty nice bronchitis. Little spoiler alert. Feeling much better today and I will go back to running this week.

The end

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1. Kiptum's rapid rise has also raised many doubts, partly due to his coach Hakizimana, who openly admitted that doping is omnipresent in Kenya's marathon scene and that only the unskilled are detected.