Word of the Week - Joining in and improving my mental health.

I don't like joining in with things. So I've picked Joining as my word of the week.

I do a lot of things but I'm not a fan of joining in with things. I get apprehensive about joining in with groups of people and activities that are already established.

I've got a lot of friends but not many live locally, not many have the same interests as me and not many are available with family commitments to come with me to join in. A low of my friends who live locally are a lot younger than me and therefore have families at home and a lot more commitments after work, dinners to cook, homework to do and activities to ferry their kids to and from, so it's harder to join in with activities on a regular basis.

I'm also not good at commitment. Yes, I managed to train and run a marathon, but it was a short term goal with very little thought and planning and with running I could just come home from work, get changed and go out the door for a run. I didn't have to think about anyone else. Peter was 100% behind me with it.

I'm not a fan of having to be a certain place at a certain time either. It's something I've been struggling with since Stephanie died, getting out the house somedays is still hard for me. I like routine, knowing what I'm doing, but I like to be in control of me, not dictated to by timeframes. I can just about manage getting to work. But give me a doctor's appointment or a coffee date, a parkrun or even a beloved football match and I can struggle to get out the door. I'm frightened something terrible will go wrong. Once I've left the house, I'm ok, but getting out the door is hard, so often once I've gone out, if I've got an appointment, like the Dr's at 6pm , I stay out after work at 4pm and go for a coffee, so I don't have to come home and start the issue with going out again. I even changed my nail bar to a sit and wait to bypass this.

I joined the local gym in November at £32.95 a month for 12 months so I could run during the winter months, but I didn't get on with the running machine and I just ran in the wind, rain, cold and the dark.

I've been a total of 13 times since joining. I could've donated that money to the charity instead. I've got 6 months left on the membership and discovered last week that there are free classes I could've been going to that would've supported my running and I was entitled to a 1 hour introduction session and a training plan to help me reach my goal.

So why didn't I know about that at the time? Because it's all on the app. I'm computer savvy, I do online banking, I run my own blog and website. I'm on tiktok with views into tens of thousands on a couple of posts. 

I told them when I joined what I wanted from the gym. I did have an introduction and said I'd never been a member of a gym before other than one where I just used the pool and sauna (there's no pool here) Said I hadn't been to an exercise class since Step aerobics in the late 80's and had no idea how to use the gym equipment.

I was shown how three pieces of equipment worked, the running and rowing machine and cross trainer and was told if I wanted to know how anything else worked to just ask.

I did ask a few weeks later when my shoulders and thighs hurt from running and was told to do 3 reps of certain exercises, but not how many per week.

So I just stopped going. I work on the theory of 'how do I know what I need to know, if I don't know, what I don't know?'

So this weekend whilst exploring the app to find out if there was anything else I could do. I booked a Legs, Bums and Tums session for Monday night at 7pm.

I arrived 15 mins early and everyone was there with a mat, bar bells and dumbbells, all chatting and friendly. I said hi and said I was new and a woman said 'grab a mat and find a space' and yep I ended up right at the front, with the mirror, with everyone behind me, looking straight ahead and I wanted to bolt.

The instructor was friendly. I told him I've never been to a class before, ever and he said it was ok, he was covering for someone else and was new here himself. He grabbed everything I needed and said just follow him and everyone else and he'd help me out as we went along.

And true to his word, he did. Everyone worked at their own speed through the routine he'd written up on the board. It was a bit of a competition with a few and it took me one rep to work out what I was doing and get my coordination going before I fell into routine and I really enjoyed it.

Tuesday I went along to the spin class at 6pm and Wednesday I went for a pump session at 6pm.

For all 3 sessions, I came home from work first, got changed and went back out for them, 15 mins before the class started.

I can book online. The classes run for 45 mins. The gym is at the retail park. I can take part at my own speed, be part of the group if I want, ignore those who are competing with themselves or others.

I've been enjoying the running, it's been good for my mental health, it's been good for the grief. It's been good for my physically.

I've got my proper introduction on Monday and I'll be asking for a training plan to support my running, just not for a marathon, just to improve my cardio. I know I can do the distance. I'm not needing to improve my time, but it would be nice to be able to run the 5k consistently in 30 mins.

Do you like joining in with things?

I joined in, but I ran alone. it's how I prefer to be.