The pull to stop

I walked a half marathon through Glasgow on Saturday night, in the dark, with hundreds of other people for charity. Three hours and twenty nine minutes. I want to tell you about a small moment in it, because it's sitting with me as being an important, and magical, moment.

We had passed the last pit stop at 10.5 miles. Five-ish kilometers to go (math is not my strong suit!) which is nothing, a walk I would do any given day. But the body was sore by then, it was also WAY past my bedtime and I was a bit hungry. I felt something.. arrive. And I want to be careful about naming it correctly. It wasn't hard. It was more like feeling the outline of a door I didn't open, maybe a quite pull. And what struck me about it, and what I have been mulling on since, is that it had almost nothing to do with the 5km.

Same road, same distance. If I had had a harder day or week behind me, if I had slept badly the night before, if I had been sorer or hungrier or carrying something heavier than my floppy water bottle, that same pull would have been enormous - even though the distance wouldn't have changed.

A few years ago (..maybe longer, pre kids, late twenties!) I walked a hundred kilometers along the South Downs Way in around 36 hours. We started off at 7am on the Saturday morning and by 3am Sunday morning, the blisters were hurting, the limps had kicked in, we had ascended a significant height on average. And then, it started to rain. There were four of us walking together, and I was so close to being done, if someone else had called it, I think I would have happily gone home. I'd have said it was a sensible decision. And, I would have believed it - I'd have mentioned the blisters and the rain and the dark for time to come afterwards and never actually mentioned that I caved because someone else did first. But, no one did. We all hunkered down. We chatted. We walked in silence. The rain eventually stopped, so did the hills. By daylight, we were rounding the final corner and heading up the final ascent back into Brighton to the finish.

Here's the thing. Everything is much lighter in the daylight. I think about this a lot. The moments anxiety creeps in for me, usually at night. The moments when I think I need that important item on Amazon. Almost always at night. So, I have a rule - I don't make decisions at night time. I don't buy anything, I don't plan anything. At most, I dump it all onto paper and then I go to sleep knowing that everything feels better in the daylight.

But back to the point, and the thought thats percolated since Saturday night - the pull to stop, it is so contagious. But so is staying.

I didn't want to write something about being gritty. There are plenty of those already and most are written by people who have perhaps never had a good reason to stop. Sometimes, stopping is the right call - sometimes, its the only smart thing left to do and we are collectively terrible at saying so out loud. I think a lot of women are still walking a route they would have abandoned years ago, if only anyone had told them they could.

The trouble is that we try to work it out by asking how much does this hurt, and pain is a terrible signal - physical and emotional. All it tells you is the thing is costing you something which you already knew. The questions that actually sort it, so far as I can tell, are tougher than that. Is this the cost of the thing, or the damage? Is it still mine? Or am I walking toward something I actually chose? Am I finishing because I said I would and I don't want to be the woman that stopped?

That last question definitely pushes me the most I think. I never want to be someone who gave up, even if it is only me who knows I did. Which means that choosing to stop sometimes is the hardest and most important thing I can decide to do for myself.

Here's where it gets awkward, when you take it out of a night walk and into a life, which is really what I want to talk about. In Glasgow, I knew it was 13.4miles. There were markers, pit stops, strangers in cars winding down their windows and beeping to strangers they will never meet.

Transitions simply don't come with any of that.

When your career ends, or the marriage does, or the children stop needing you, or you simply wake up at forty something not recognising the life you are living, there is no marker. No one tells you you are at 10.5 miles, or that there is just four more kilometers. So the question 'Am I nearly there' is one you cannot answer and if you can't answer it, you can't use it to decide anything. Though, this doesn't stop most of us trying.

So we do it by feel instead, and feel is weather. We push on with the thing we should have put down two years ago, because stopping means admitting something we are simply not ready to admit. We abandon the things we should have stayed with, in a hard week or a sore day, because it happened to be raining and 3am and someone we trusted went quiet first.

You don't have to decide at 3 in the morning. Almost nothing has to be decided at the lowest or hardest point, and this is the single worst place from which to judge the whole route.

On Saturday, I was walking with people in their sixties, or older, with teenagers and children and even a baby asleep in their buggy - going through the middle of Glasgow at 10.30pm at night, every one of them there because of somebody they loved. Because of hope. That doesn't shorten the distance by a single step but it absolutely changes what the distance costs you. Both of the walks I finished were the ones where somebody else was still walking beside me.

So it is not a question of whethere you're a woman who pushes through or a woman who stops. Both are choices you can make and both are pefectly valid and important choices. The question is, what is the pull you are feeling actually made of.

Stopping isn't the opposite of pushing through - it is the same question, posed differently.

Ask it in daylight, Ask it in company and be very suspicious if that answer arrives at three in the morning.