Woody Wonders

In just under a year's time I'll be running my 13th marathon.   It's been a few years since my last one and I'd already been thinking about the possibility of doing another one when the opportunity was handed to me on a plate. I was scrolling mindlessly on my phone when up popped the  'Rob Burrow Leeds Marathon' .  Many of you may already know his story through either being rugby fans or being impacted in some way by MND. I didn't need to read anything else, I was doing it and that was that.  The reason I didn't need to know anything else about it, and to give you some context, is that I lost my own sister to motor neurone disease.  The opportunity to be part of a race dedicated to raising awareness and funds for MND is going to be both epic and emotional. The bottom of my world fell out when my sister told me her diagnosis, because there is no cure; MND kills a third of people within a year and more than half within two years of diagnosis.  I lost my ...

Tomorrow sees the start of 'Mental Health Awareness Week' (9-15 May) with this year's theme being loneliness. Throughout my blog, I'm going to use the terms 'mind health' , 'mindfulness' and such words.  Personally, I don't like the term 'mental health' .  When my grandad was alive, he went through a period of depression and back in those days, 'mental health' had very negative connotations around it.  Of course, we have come a very long way since then but it's still a term I'm not fully comfortable with. I'm not going going to talk about loneliness per se but I am going to touch on how important it is to feel part of something. In my role as a PA, you belong everywhere yet nowhere, you feel on the periphery yet central, you're part of everything yet nothing.  When you have a very different role to everyone else, it's easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you are not part of the team.  You couldn't be m...