Falling out of love with running can be the most heart wrenching breakup you’ll ever experience.

Everything is fine, it has been for ages, then almost imperceptibly the cracks start to appear. They start small, little annoyances that you can excuse because the whole is so much better than that one run you didn’t enjoy quite as much as usual. But soon the little things start to add up, it gets longer between good runs and easier to turn your back on them completely.

Then one day, without you knowing how it’s come to this, you just don’t want to spend any time in your trainers.

And it’s sad.

Because you miss it, but that doesn’t make it any easier to fix. You know it’s good for you, that if you just reached out to your lycra maybe you could put all this right…

…but it doesn’t happen, because the pain of not running seems less than the pain of risking it all, putting yourself out there and getting hurt. What if you give it a go and don’t love it? Could you ever rescue yourself and have another go?

So suddenly you’re without your beloved, that thing that makes you happy and keeps you going; you’ve lost a part of yourself in the process as well, you’re without that love that has defined you for so long. So you decide to force yourself back in the game, you arrange a date or two…or in my case three, half marathon dates.

And now comes the real heartache, because you’ve given yourself that glimmer of hope, a reminder of how good it can be when you’re relationship is perfect – but the reality is you still don’t love it. You go through the motions when it’s unavoidable, and sometimes it’s all over too quick and sometimes it drags on for ages, but a run rarely leaves you satisfied like it did before and it leaves you empty and dejected, especially the knowledge that you’ll have to do it again soon.

So with less than two weeks until Cheltenham Half, three until Cardiff and Stroud not long after that I need to find a way to inject the spark back in to my relationship with running.

All suggestions welcome…