Resting under a blanket of tiredness

Just over a week since I finished my 1,400-mile jaunt around Ireland, I'm almost ready to go for a little run again

Running in Dingle with Kevin Leahy (left) and Dáithí de Mórdha.

Did that all really happen? For weeks, every day I got up, had breakfast, filled my water bottles, checked my route, and then with a wave to Marietta and Ossian I set off on my merry way. At times it was exhausting, the hours could drag on, my body ached. But the road, or trail, was always out there, and moving along it was my constant. It was simple, all-consuming. It became normal.

And then, just like that I stepped out of it, and it was gone. I completed my run around Ireland, and suddenly I was home, dealing with a messy house, unpaid bills, the school run. In the briefest flash, I switched from a life of constant running, back to the old one, and that was it, the magical mystery tour around Ireland was over. No gradual transition, no decompression chamber. Just bam, the lights came on and I was in a different room, in a different country. 

I haven’t really had a chance yet to turn around and look back out of the window, to see my run around Ireland sitting there in the distance. It’s all still there, of course, in my memories, in the stories yet to be told. And I will go there. I’ll have to, in order to write my book, and for that I’m grateful. It would be easy to never properly look back, but to just keep plowing onwards. But I’m looking forward to looking back. I’m looking forward to re-entering all those places in my memories, to savouring them all again, even the difficult bits. I guess that’s one of the things about being a writer, you get to indulge in your memories. It’s actually your job to spend time diving back in, soaking them up, roaming around in them and then trying to bring them back to life on the page. I love that.