Days 68 to 70.....this is called 'the wall'

In my sporting life I am well versed in the concept of 'the wall', that moment during sport when your body says 'no ta, I think I will stop' and your brain madly tries to talk your body out of doing such a silly thing. I have experienced the wall from two main perspectives. Firstly and most obviously as something I am trying to get through in some well intentioned but remarkably unspectacular sporting endeavour and secondly as something I have watched and talked others through in my old role as a rowing cox.

Although there is something electrically satisfying in finding the other side of the wall as an individual, whether it be within a team sport or alone with only the treadmill to blame it on, I personally found more pleasure from the rowing type of wall. I enjoyed knowing the rowers I trained with, knowing where their limits lay and what motivated each one of them. I loved that understanding those things enabled me to talk to them as they pushed themselves to the physical limit and ultimately I loved knowing that the knowledge that I had and how I used it could be the difference between them breaking through the wall and not, the difference between winning and losing.

Now I find myself facing an altogether different type of wall. The wall I know is one laced with physical pain, broken down only with a grim tradeoff of sweat and tears as mind battles body on it's way to the fabled second wind. Today's wall is a wall of high street shops, glossy magazines and transactional websites, all beckoning me to fail. Like an intrepid member of the public preparing to run the gauntlet in the street style version of Gladiators, I find myself looking on the 10 months ahead as an almost insurmountable barrage of obstacles and temptations. Gratings to damage my shoes, dark socks to ruin my white t-shirts, Oxford Street two tube stops from my new office, GAP launching a transactional website and Jack Will catalogues raining on my head.

I suddenly find my mind telling me  that it is not possible to succeed, it strikes me as incredibly similar to the feeling one gets halfway through a hideous run in the rain. Your brain starts to tell you little lies, that death is just moments away unless you stop immediately and you find yourself in a battle to prevent your subsconscious forcing you to become immediately motionless. Metaphorically I am in that place, I could at any point lose control of myself and find that I have bought something with no conscious authorisation of a transaction. I have dreamt about buying just one little thing, a little pretty piece of jewellery or a teensy little cardi, in my dream it would hardly make any difference, no one would even notice.

It is such terribly covert workings of my mind which have begun to worry me a little as I consider the months ahead. Is it possible for me to make it, is it worth it. If I didn't make it would anyone care? I admit, I found myself having some form of schizophrenic argument with myself the other morning; the pragmatic side of my mind told the drama side that it was being ridiculous and the end of the world wouldn't be speeded by the lack of shoe boots in my wadrrobe (yes I was confused too). What it all seems to boil down to is whether the perceived gain of making it through Hanger Strike is worth the mental pain it will take me to achieve it.

Late on for a Monday at work and a Crunchie to help me through the evening. I suspect I would have benefited from having my snap taken earlier in the day.

I suppose only time will tell. In the mean time I had better manage this week as I have been featured in Manchester's Large Magazine and it would be embarrassing to fail when I have been put in the spotlight! Onwards and upwards my friends.

Day 69: my first outfit duplication, again I had a bit of a long day and this was taken after driving to and from London. Not my freshest.

Today is day 70 which feels in some way momentous. I celebrated by showcasing the whitest legs in Christendom before freaking out and buying St Tropez....more of that tomorrow.