[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”14629″ img_size=”large” alignment=”center”][vcex_heading text=”Foreword” text_align=”center” font_size=”28px” css=”.vc_custom_1480357061047{padding-bottom: 50px !important;}”][vc_column_text]I’m an ordinary guy.
1.82 meters tall, weighing 80 kilos. Bold, caucasian, speaking 2-3 languages.
I don’t have any extraordinary skills, I don’t know how to read minds or to predict the future. I eat, sleep, dream, talk and do stuff every day, just like you.
The only thing that may be different is my running routine.
I started to run late, when I was 42. Back then, my life was a big, smelly and unavoidable mess. By that time I have lost in the real estate bubble all I made as a successful online entrepreneur. And then some more, being actually in debt. On the personal level, I was just starting to understand how my second divorce turned my universe upside down. And health-wise, I was weighing 100 kilos, couldn’t climb a stair to the first floor without my head exploding and I was eating emotionally. A lot.
But what was even worse than that was my self-esteem, which, in all this process, got completely lost. For ever, I thought at that time.
The spooky thing about depression is that it sneaks in. There aren’t really trumpets and loud voices announcing: “Hail, hail, this is depression entering the room, all rise!” Nope. It’s slow, silent, creepy. It doesn’t even look like depression. It starts with small isolation thoughts like: “Maybe I shouldn’t get out today, I just don’t feel like going out”. And then it does the same next day. And then the day after that and so on. And then it starts to whisper louder and louder in your ears: “Why would you go outside, you loser? Didn’t have enough yet? Want more people to make fun of how much of a big, fat loser you are?”
And then you start to breath in guilt and shame, instead of air. Every breathe you take is putting more dark thoughts into your body.
Until you get stuck. You can’t move anymore. At all.
One of the most common sensations I had during those times was me curling down in a corner, crushed by the immense weight of a huge, invisible fist pushing me down. I was feeling like this when I was lying down in the bed, when I was walking around in the backyard, when I was talking to people on the phone. Crushed by an immense, invisible fist, unable to move, in any direction, just waiting to be completely destroyed.
Sometimes I was actually hoping that the destruction will come from that fist, somehow, because it would have spare me the effort of doing it myself. Yes, there were times when I felt the only viable way out from that nothingness was my physical extinction. I think the word many of you use for that is “suicidal”.
The book you are about to read is the chronicle of my way out of that space.
It’s not so much about being able to run hundreds of kilometers – although a lot of it will be just stories about my races – as it is about how to regain balance and overcome anxiety and loss.
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