380 Sarah K Brandis ~ What To Do When Our Passions Lead To Burnout

Transcript

Holly:  Hello adventurers and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 380. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another guest. This week’s guest is my friend Sarah K Brandis. I was inspired by her recent article on Medium to invite her onto the show. I have got some ambitious goals coming up with my running and I want to be sure that I don’t end up burned out with all the training for that combined with kickboxing and hiking. So, while this specific conversation is about running, and marathon running, the things we discuss can apply to all types of fitness and adventures: hiking, cycling, whatever. And as you will hear in this episode, they also apply to work, business and life in general.

Now, Sarah was also a recent guest blogger on my website and she wrote a post called ‘Solo Trail Running for Women, Staying Safe in the Outdoors’. So I will link to that in the show notes so that you can check that out.

About Sarah K Brandis

Sarah is a mental health writer, an enthusiastic amateur distance runner, an ‘elective orphan’ and content marketer – although she is trying to shed that last role and simplify her life.

Having cut contact with her abusive parents at age 16, Sarah’s life has been an adventure, filled with learning things the hardest way possible. Her latest mission is to understand and break that habit of going the long way around, and to share that journey in her writing. I will link in the show notes to Sarah’s books and where you can follow her on Medium.

In the meantime what are you going to learn on this episode?

We talk about how to know when you’re experiencing training burnout, because it can be hard to see. What to do to recover from training burnout. How to adjust the rest of your lifestyle to match your training schedule; things you can do to prevent burnout in the future; and what it actually means to “listen to your body” – what are the things you need to pay attention to? Because it sounds really kind of nebulous, ‘you need to learn to listen to your body’, what does that mean? That’s what we talk about in this episode.

So I hope you find this episode interesting and useful. I really, really, enjoyed this conversation and I think I learned a lot, you are going to learn a lot, and I think it is just a really useful thing to have in mind, as we set our goals for the new year, and as we work to achieve those goals. So without further ado, here is the episode.

Holly: Hi Sarah!

Sarah: Hello, how are you?

Holly: Good! I am really looking forward to our conversation today, it is very timely for me.

Sarah: Yeah, me too actually. I have been listening to your podcast since the days of the ‘hello gorgeous’ lady, so I am really excited to be here!

Holly: {laughing} The ‘hello gorgeous’ lady that no one liked and finally people told me!

Sarah: She is memorable.

Holly: She is memorable, I did like her, I liked her voice! So that was the Scottish woman who used to do my intro and outro, she was just a voice actor that I hired on Fivver, but she is long gone… So today, we are going to talk about what to do when our passions lead to burnout? What to do when we overtrain for the things that we love and then we can’t do them anymore? I myself get caught up a lot in my outdoors adventures, and training, and I often don’t take into consideration sufficient recovery time and work/life balance. So I was really excited to read your article on Medium, which we are going to link to in the show notes, because it just felt very, very, timely to me, because I am starting to get super-excited about running and doing races and I am realising I need to be mindful about how I get myself into this.

Sarah: Yes absolutely, just to say I am the same.

Holly: It is so hard to find that balance because I am passionate and I get excited and then… too much! So what is your sport of choice and how did you get into it?

Sarah: My sport of choice is running, and I use that term quite generally. Some people are very specific they like road running, or they like a certain distance. For me, it is any running, on any terrain, any distance, it all appeals to me and I got into it with a really classic quarter-life-crisis.

Holly: Tell us a little bit about that?

Sarah: So I was 26, I was in a bad job – not that it is bad in general, just that it was not at all aligned with me, I was running pubs and venues and I am an introvert and a writer, so you can see how that was a bad decision to begin with! – and I was in a bad marriage that was bad by definition and I was just really unhappy. I had never run at that point apart (from to the bus really!) and I was drinking quite heavily with my Area Manager because he was probably feeling similarly quarter life crisis-y at the time and we had sort of come to this drunken conclusion that we needed to have some sort of goal, something outside of the work that we weren’t terribly passionate about. He had seen somewhere online an advertisement for the Arctic Circle marathon, which is completely bonkers. At the time it cost about £30,000 to get a charity place in it and it is completely insane, and I loved the idea, I thought it sounded amazing – we were very drunk did I mention that?

Holly: Yes, yes! {laughing}

Sarah: I was like, ‘hell yeah I would do this’. And then in the morning with his hangover remorse, he stared to back out of it and say that it was a terrible idea. I kind of agreed that raising £30k would be very hard and, certainly without him helping me, I didn’t think I could do it on my own; but I did want to run a marathon, all of a sudden, with no idea really what a marathon was. I didn’t even know the distance, I didn’t know it was 26.2 miles, I didn’t know how long it would take to run one, how long it would take to train. But I got onto Google with my thumping hangover and the first marathon that I found was New York 2009 so I pulled out my credit card and I bought myself a place.

Holly: Wow! that is a huge trip to make for your first race!

Sarah: Yeah, go hard or go home!

Holly: {laughing} I really like hearing your story because I started running about the same time in life and I had a really difficult business, and I had a really difficult relationship, and running I think was what kept be going, during that, it probably kept me alive, and it just kept me surviving my extreme stress that I was going through. So running has a very special place in my heart because I think it just got me through a very, very, dark place in my life.

Sarah: That is something that I hear from a lot of people. A lot of people find running when they are in a dark place and it gives them such an all-consuming focus because, when you are running really hard, you are focussing on so many essential things like breathing, and staying upright and not smacking into a tree and not getting hit by a car and it makes you be present, and it stops you from ruminating about all the things that are wrong, plus the endorphin rush, plus the achievement, plus the fitness – it is a really healthy thing to be doing for the most part. Obviously today we will talk about how it is not so healthy as well!

Holly: {laughing} Yes, I agree, I agree. It was absolutely life-changing for me because I wasn’t at all athletic before I started running, I didn’t do sports in school, I thought I just wasn’t a sporty kind of person and so running also changed that mindset for me because I realised that, if I trained, I could get better. I didn’t know that before, I just thought you were born athletic or you weren’t and I wasn’t, so that was that.

Sarah: Mm I know, running is one of those amazing sports where you don’t time out too young, it is not like gymnastics where you have to be doing it when you are 11 otherwise you have got no hope. It is one of those things that you can really improve with with age and I love that, it gives me something to look forward to in my 40s, 50s, and beyond.

Holly: Yes exactly. We just really got obsessed over lockdown about watching all these documentaries about ultra runners and in my mind I am starting to fantasise: what if I could do something like that? That would be amazing. And then my mind goes, ‘no you are too old for that’, and then in one of the documentaries someone made the comment, ‘oh a lot of ultra runners are in their 40s and 50s’. And I was like, ‘Oh! Maybe I am not too old!’. So yeah, it really is something that you can do all your life and when I go to races and I see older people, like this race that Agustin and I did in Exmoor a couple of weekends ago, there were people in their 70s running this race and there were older people running the ultra as well, this was a really, really, tough course and I just thought, ‘God, that is what I want when I am older, I want to be in the kind of shape where I can do these things!’

Sarah: I think the longer the distance, in terms of it being a marathon, or an ultra, probably to some degree the better that age is for you because, 5k and 10k, that is all about pushing yourself and being speedy, which is for when you are younger perhaps but with distance running it is about pacing yourself, and mental resilience, and being sensible and knowing when to quit — and these are not things that we have in our 20s they are things that we learn as we grow.

Holly: That’s a really good reflection because one of my biggest problems with running is mindset. So my mindset has been great for business and other kinds of goals but my running mindset has been trash. So it is really hard for me to push through those times when my brain is going, ‘oh it is just not a good day maybe you should walk’, or ‘oh you know this is hurting so maybe you should slow down’. It is really hard for me to kind of get that mindset to keep going when I don’t feel fabulous —and of course I don’t always feel fabulous when I am running, {laughing} there is always a little something that is not quite right!

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely, I have definitely had not just days like that, but really expensive marathon days, that I have paid a lot of money to be there, and then on race day I have thought, ‘oh I don’t feel like it!’. But the last one I can think of that I didn’t want to start, I was in a terrible mood for some reason, it was Venice marathon 2018, and it was much older runner, a gentlemen called Danielle, who spotted me struggling. We don’t really speak the same language (my Italian is basic to put it mildly, it is really bad!), but with his bad grasp of English, and my very bad grasp of Italian, we were sort of going along together for kilometres and kilometres – and it was him that kept me going. I always find if I am struggling in a long distance race, find someone mature, find someone that looks like an experienced runner, because they have got it down and it is not about what your legs can do, it is about your brain. Yeah, we have all had those races, and those days, definitely, I still struggle with keeping myself going, I am not always motivated and that is human.  

Holly: Yeah I think so, and that is a really good piece of advice because Agustin just ran his first run a couple of weeks ago at Exmoor and it was a 50k, and he had never run a race before, and that was his first, and it was a really challenging course compared to what we had done. Obviously he had trained for it it wasn’t like he just woke up and thought, ‘I will just do a 50k run!’, he had the ability to do it but still, he had never done an event like that. And about two thirds of the way through the race he found this older guy who was a super experienced older runner, maybe 10 or 15 years older than Augustin, and they ran together the last bit of the race. He said that was what kept him going, that was what kept him motivated and happy about the run, because they were chatting the whole time and he just learned so much from this guy.

Sarah: Yeah, I love that, that is brave for a first race as well.

Holly: Yes it is! He had originally signed up for the half-marathon and then he kept training longer and longer distances and it got to the point where he was like, ‘well I have just run 60k last weekend, so maybe I should sign up for the 50k instead of the half-marathon, because I know that I can do 50k’, so yeah. 

Sarah: Wow, well done!

Holly: Yes I know, I was so impressed, I was so impressed, I did the 10k and it was a really, really, rough course so I can’t even imagine what he went through! So we are here today to talk about the dark side of running, when we train too much and when we get training burnout. So what is training burnout?

Sarah: So it is really just burnout with the word training stuck on the front of it! We all know what burnout is, really, that is all it is! We all know what burnout is, it is so common these days to have career burnout, and with training burnout it is literally just that: it is not tiredness, it is not just, ‘I have run too much and I need a rest day’. I think the difference between exhaustion and burnout is when a bit of rest doesn’t fix it, if you know what I mean?

Holly: Ah yes.

Sarah: So there is this theory going round in the psychology world with career burnout that a holiday is how you can tell if you are tired or burnt out. If you go on holiday for a week and come back and feel refreshed, great, you were just really tired. If you go on holiday for a week, two weeks, three weeks, and you are still not ready to come back to work, you are burnt out. And I think it is really similar with training, if a couple of rest days and a good carb binge on pizza doesn’t fix it, then you have overdone it at some point and you need to start pairing it back and reassessing because you have burnt yourself out. And it can be a combination of physically and mentally and emotionally as well and it can feel really tough, you can go from loving running, and loving what you are doing, to feeling really demotivated because you are missing all those endorphins at the same time, that can really push you a bit further down that dark hole.

Holly: So how did you know that you were in burnout? What were the signs that you saw?

Sarah: Well, I think I saw the signs, and I knew it intellectually, long before I had admitted it to myself emotionally, or spiritually, because I am tremendously stubborn and that is clearly how I got to this state in the first place. But, for me, it was when I couldn’t make my legs move any longer and my body gave out before my spirit did, because I am so stubborn, and that is not a good thing, it is really not – you think it is, but it is not. It was 2019, last year, and I set myself this arbitrary goal for no good reason to run four full marathons in 2019 and I had got through the first two, and they were sort of relatively back-to-back, five weeks apart. And so I had done quite a lot of soft tissue damage to myself at that point, I gave myself a month off to recover before starting my summer training block for the autumn marathons and on starting that summer training block, I just couldn’t do the long runs, I could do the short training sessions. I had a Sunday and I realised actually, when you asked me for links and things for the show notes, on my YouTube channel there is a video vlog of this, my long run Sunday, which is a total fail. I was trying to push myself out the door for a long run and it was early in the training plan, so I guess it wouldn’t have been more than about 10/12k, it wasn’t a stupidly long run, but I couldn’t get myself moving. I took three attempts that day: I got up for an early run, failed, came home, went back to bed, I told myself, ‘I just need a nap, I just need another hour of sleep, a bit more food, a bit more caffeine’, tried again, didn’t happen, I tried three times before I finally admitted that I was done.  

Holly: Wow! I don’t think I would try again on the same day. I think if I had such a bad run that I had to go home I would be like, ‘okay, today is not the day’. So I am really impressed that you gave it three goes.

Sarah: Sort of impressed in a bad way though, it is not healthy. It is not a good mindset, I think there is a tipping point where you go from being motivated to where you are self-flagellating at a certain point.

Holly: Yeah, and stubborn as you said. And when you first said that you were really stubborn about that I was thinking, ‘I would like some of that, I feel like I need some of that’, but it is such a difficult balance to find between giving up too soon and pushing yourself too hard. 

Sarah: And this is the trouble, this is going to turn into a bit of a societal rant and you will have to pull the plug on me at some point.

Holly: No that is fine, go ahead.

Sarah: I think we are raised on this as well, because we are that generation, our parents or our grandparents survived World War II, and we have been brought up with their ethics, all that stoicism and it is little bit too much for our generation, because it doesn’t quite apply to us. We have taken that message of stoicism and we have embodied it, but we are not going through a war, so if we are not suffering that much [we think] ‘are we being a bit soft, should we suffer a bit more?’ And we kind of beat ourselves up and yeah I think we are all raised with slightly the wrong message and I think we need to be educated on when to rest and that it is okay and it is not shameful to rest.

Holly: Yeah, I had a run this morning and I walked little bits of it, it was like, it was 15k, so it wasn’t short, but it wasn’t long, but it was the longest I had run in recent years. But there were points where I just felt like I needed to walk a couple of minutes {laughing}. And I did that a few times and I felt really bad about myself, it was like: this isn’t much of an incline, I should be pushing myself, I shouldn’t be allowing myself to walk, but then it got to the point where it was like: do you know what I really want to also enjoy this run, so I think I will just walk for a minute or two. {laughing}

Sarah: It is good for your cardiovascular, I don’t want to get into a huge science debate – and disclaimer, I am not a sports scientist – but there are a lot of sports scientists and authors that ascribe to the theory that over a certain distance you don’t want to be working anaerobically and really puffing yourself out, it is good to stop and bring your heart rate down because you want to stay in the lower heart rate zones to be burning the fat, which is the method you want to employ when you are going longer distances. So science said you did fine Holly!

Holly: Oh good, thank you, thank you science! {laughing} And I think that is something that I haven’t really gotten into, is looking at zone two, zone whatever, whereas my husband is just starting to work with a running coach and he has been given him this 29-week running plan and: you have got to train so many minutes and so many miles in zone two. And I am like: I don’t want to run like that… but maybe I do need to start looking at that, so.

Sarah: Yeah and certainly, when I return to running, once I am done recovering from my burnout, I will be using probably the Maffetone method which is really commonly known and you can google it and find lots of resources.

Holly: Okay, I will link to that in the show notes, and I will look that up myself, because I haven’t done much research about this; I ran years ago, then I stopped running and now I am starting again but it is just like I am going out and running, I am not really looking at the science behind it, and I think I need to start doing that so I can avoid burnout. So you managed two of your marathons, in 2019, what happened with the other two?

Sarah: So I had that moment in training, where my legs just wouldn’t work and I had three attempts to leave the house and then, after that day, I realised that I was off track, and I started to get worried. One of my marathons I had to cancel, because there was no alternative to downgrade to a shorter race and the other one, which was Bournemouth, I downgraded it to the half marathon, which I did, that was much more suitable for me, I could do that without too much training at that point. But then after that, after I got through the autumn with just doing one half marathon, instead of two marathons, but in a good way it was a positive experience, I actually enjoyed that half marathon because I took the pressure off myself. I went with my friends from a local running group, we had a girls weekend in the hotel and ate a ton of carbs and just had so much fun, it was lovely. But after that my body started to crumble on me, I started getting sickness after sickness and then in January I caught a virus, and I don’t know whether it was the virus, but ever since then I have had a diagnosis of post-virus chronic fatigue. So I have been doing very little training and I am just being forced to rest now which, it is like my idea of hell, having to learn the lesson.

Holly: Yeah, so did you go to the GP? How do they test for chronic fatigue? How do they know?

Sarah: You can’t really test for it – they sort of test for other things, so they make sure you are not vitamin deficient and anaemic. I am also being tested, still, because it is taking ages this year, obviously, I am still being tested for sleep apnoea which is one of her first assumptions. There is a thing, a belief I suppose, because we don’t have enough data to study it, but there is a belief doing the rounds, that long-Covid is a trigger for sleep apnoea, there is a correlation, so I don’t know which virus I had, but I am being tested for sleep apnoea still, even now, until the end of the year and they just ended up diagnosing post-viral chronic fatigue for lack of anything else to diagnose. It is one of those things that, if you have tested for everything else, if nothing else shows up, ‘will it must be chronic fatigue’. So that’s what I got.

Holly: Yeah, that makes sense. So after this virus, and after you had the three times where you tried to run three times in a day and you couldn’t, how else were you feeling? How was your body feeling on a day-to-day basis that gave you a clue that something was really wrong?

Sarah: Mmm bits of everything. My immune system was lower, because I was catching illness after illness. I have always had slightly irritable bowels but they were worse, I had much worse IBS, I suspected that I had leaky gut around January/February time and so I started to change my diet for that. I had to give up coffee for a while, and that was really painful, almost as painful as giving up running! And what else, insomnia, walking up tired, worse migraines than usual… just all the fun stuff! General muscle weakness, body aches and pains, but still I couldn’t turn off my stubborn streak. Once I got my health to even out a little bit in sort of March time, I started going back to training again, and I had to try that a few times, hit a wall, realised that I couldn’t train when I was ill, and then stop again, and then start again, and then stop again. I think it has only really been this summer, 2020, that I have actually finally understood that I can’t push my body right now, it has got to do a thing, it has got to heal first and then I have got to come back from scratch. I am not going to be marathon girl next year because that is too much of a stretch and I have to build from nothing again – and I have accepted that now. Yeah I think the mental challenge has been tougher than the physical challenge for me, despite all the illness, it is the fighting with my own mind that has been really hard, like getting myself to accept that this is where I am, that was the hardest.

Holly: And feeling like this was the appropriate thing and not that you are giving up, or you are lazy, or whatever, because those are all the things that would go through my mind.

Sarah: Yeah absolutely: lazy, yeah weak, all of those things and that feeling of missing out as well, seeing all my friends going running every week and being:  ah I will just hold your coats. That is quite sad!

Holly: So what have you been doing to recover, aside from resting, have you been changing your life in other ways? Meditating more? I don’t know.

Sarah: So I tried all sorts of things. I think I can say pretty confidentially that generally supplements are not the answer. That’s the first thing I went to, when I was first really tired and foggy, and suffering from what felt like leaky gut in January and February. I was following all the sort of functional medicine, biohacking advice I could find, so anything written by Dave Asprey, or Dr Mark Hyman, I was all over it. I bought all these devices, all these things that are supposed to make your home healthier, I bought lots of supplements, I just tried shoving more stuff into me: vitamins, minerals, anything I could get my hands on that was supposed to help: probiotics, prebiotics, I ate Kimchee (that’s disgusting and I hate it!), I gave up coffee. I did all of these things in the stubborn belief that there would be one silver bullet which would suddenly turn my energy back on, and none of it worked. So once I finally got over that phase and stopped buying pointless things on Amazon, then it became, ‘okay what else can I do?’. So meditation, I have been really into Qigong lately, that is been helping a little bit, so that’s good.

Holly: Good!

Sarah: Following my doctor’s advice, following holistic healer’s advice, I will take a bit of East and a bit of West and mix it together, bit of everything, but I think what has actually moved the needle the most for me was stopping going to the gym. That sounds weird, and it feels weird to say it, but I was still pushing when I shouldn’t be pushing, my heart rate still said, ‘no, no, no, it is too much’, even really light exercise would push my heart rate too high and then I crashed for weeks afterwards, and it was accepting that, and stopping exercising entirely, even though it felt wrong, even though I was putting on weight, even though I felt lazy, and it wasn’t mentally the best thing for me at the time, physically, it was what my body needed.

Holly: So what were you doing at the gym? Were you doing weights or were you running on a treadmill? What were you doing there that was too much?

Sarah: Well, we had had lockdown, so when lockdown started to lift and we were allowed to train in small groups of six I think outside, my local gym was doing a get together on a Wednesday night in the local park, so I was doing Wednesday night circuit training with them in the park and then on Saturday I was doing a Zoom circuits class with them and then going for power walks in between, and that was too much. I was really tiring myself out so I have paired it back, I don’t walk for more than about 10-15 minutes at a time now, just a couple of k’s and that seems to be okay for where I am at and that is where I am going to have to build from.

Holly: So you are keeping your body moving but very light and very short and you are recovering in between.

Sarah: Yeah, very small and gentle, so think Qigong videos for about ten minutes at a time on YouTube, short walks, not running, not getting my heart rate high, really focussing on my breathing and keeping an eye on my heart rate and my blood pressure.

Holly: And how has your sleep been through this? Were you able to get past the insomnia and actually get the rest that you needed?

Sarah: Up and down, yes, as you know, I am a mother of cats, so sometimes I get woken up by the 3am cat parade! but apart from that generally the insomnia has calmed down quite a lot now and so yeah, I am doing better sleep-wise. My partner has been on shifts as, because when the world changed, he went to work at a local hospital as a bed buddy, so sometimes he is out all night which mean I get the bed to myself and other times he is recovering from doing that which means I get a night of him sleeping feverishly and kicking me. So it is up and down but that is just like anyone really. The insomnia has gone for the most part and I do feel the benefit when I have had a good night’s sleep, it makes a big difference to my levels of focus.

Holly: Yeah absolutely. So how have you changed the rest of your lifestyle to help you recover, I know you have made some changes in your business.

Sarah: Mmm yeah, so as much as I changed my training that wasn’t really the biggest or the most important change for me, what has really been making a difference to me lately is the change in my work. So I am a freelance writer now, and I need to start getting used to saying that, it is very new, because I was a freelance content marketer.

Holly: Yay!

Sarah: (Yay I know!) I was doing all the things marketing-wise, so to go back to four years ago when I first became freelance, I would do your social media, I would write your blog posts, I would rewrite your website, I would redesign your website. I did pretty much anything content marketing wise: advertising, SEO, you name it I would do it, because I was grasping for work, I was kind of desperate being a new freelancer. But also, this is a bit like the mindset thing with running and punishing ourselves, it was a should as well, because I had had a job that had meant that I had to learn everything about digital marking, I suddenly felt like I should be doing all those things, so it was kind of a guilt thing. And I actually, I have not only had training burnout I have burnt myself out at work, at least twice. I am not sure what I am classing my current chronic fatigue thing as, if it is training burnout, if it is chronic fatigue, if it is work burnout, if it is the magic trisector of all three but, previous to this, I have had two burnouts at work in the last four years, so I probably had all of this coming. But that was simply from doing too much work, as well as doing such a wide range of work. I also had, at my worst, and the time that led to my first burnout, I had fourteen clients every week.

Holly: Oh wow!

Sarah: Yeah and I had to organise them on a spreadsheet because I was working with very, very, small business owners, so solo-prenuers, life coaches, people who didn’t have much budget, so they could only afford to have two or four hours with me a week, and I would accept that, because I was accepting anything back then. I had a spreadsheet for the week and it was like, ‘okay this person has two hours here, and this is the time that they are allowed to phone me or Skype me and this is the time that I am doing their work, and then this person has got three hours here, so I am over there…’. So I think, with all of that task switching – which I now know is very cognitively demanding – I had really burnt myself out. And I remember the moment that I was burnt out then, I was with one of my regular clients, I was at work, which was embarrassing, she had organised a weekend of speaker training and I was listening to one of the speakers and he was talking about purpose, and adventure racing, which obviously is really exciting to me, and I just started crying and I couldn’t stop myself and I had to sneak out of the room, hoping that nobody saw me because I was at work, and supposed to be being a professional grownup but I was sobbing uncontrollably. I think it is because I had realised that I was really missing what he was talking about because I had no adventure, or sport, or fun in my life, because I was overworking, basically. So that was work burnout number one, and that was in 2016, so it was before I had got back into running for the second time. I don’t think I told you my running timeline, but I had started in 2009, I did a second marathon in 2011, I then took a seven year break because I got obsessed with my career.

Holly: Oh wow.

Sarah: I didn’t come back to running until 2018, probably after, yeah it was, after that first burnout, listening to that talk and crying about my lack of purpose, there you go, then I had another existential crisis and started training for the London marathon.

Holly: Well then at least then you had more adventure in your life! {laughing}

Sarah: Yeah oh I certainly did.

Holly: So what are you doing now? How have you changed your business now? You said that you were focussing on content writing, rather than content marketing, but how has that changed from your day-to-day work?  That sounds really, really, stressful, what you were talking about, you know three hours here, two hours there, that would burn me out for sure. So what are you doing now? What does your business look like now?

Sarah: So I switched two essential elements of it, one, is the number of clients, I have less clients and I try and take bigger projects, with more regularity, so that I am not task switching from person to person, and the other thing is the type of work, instead of doing 57 different marketing tasks, I am just writing. And I am trying to keep it to just content, so blog posts and books.

Holly: Mmm so you are ghost writing books?

Sarah: I am, yes!

Holly: How exciting!

Sarah: But you can’t tell anyone because I am a ghost and it is a secret.

Holly: Exactly. Well we can’t tell who your clients are, but you are ghosting for someone.

Sarah: Yes.

Holly: That’s fantastic, I let go of seeing one-to-one clients a couple of years ago to focus on my writing, and that was a huge shift in my lifestyle. I am still struggling to make a living from my writing and I still have author clients that I work with, but it has made a big difference in terms of… I loved one-to-one client calls but I used to get so stressed from just having calls in my calendar, I don’t know what it is. I just completely cut them out altogether and it has made it a lot easier for me to get through each work, even though I loved the work, the calls were just so stressful.

Sarah: Do you think it is the introvert, or the aspie thing, because you and I are very much alike. We love helping people but it is draining.

Holly: I think it is both.

Sarah: Whether they mean to be or not.

Holly: Exactly, even if you love them, they are still draining, I think it is for sure both, the aspie-ness and the introvert-ness, and it is too bad, because I love it. And I think that is also why I stopped having people on my podcast for so long and then really started itching to get back into these conversations, because I really enjoy having deep, interesting, conversations with people that are also useful to other people. So I am really excited to be doing this again, but I know I had to stop it for a while to kind of recharge, and I don’t know, recollect and…

Sarah: There is a little bit of a parallel with running and training there as well, because I feel like personally, if I do something that is very people-y at work, I need to plan in a bit of buffer time afterwards to recalibrate and get back into my introvert bubble. I never used to do that before I burnt out, I used to keep pressing on. Whereas today, because I know that I am going to spend maybe an hour talking to you – and you are lovely, and you don’t drain me, but peopling is draining – so I have decided that I will spend a good hour or two this afternoon catching up on Rivera because I am going to need that rest time.

Holly: Yeah exactly.

Sarah:You just have to plan for it.

Holly: Yeah and give yourself permission to have that time off and not think like, ‘oh if I were a normal person I would press on’, or ‘if I were an extrovert’, or whatever, it is giving yourself that permission to kind of slow down after you have done something that you know is a bit more challenging, or stressful, or draining. 

Sarah: Mmm absolutely and I have only just learnt this lesson at 39½ years of age, so it was a hard lesson learned, so if you are listening to this and if you are struggling with letting yourself live how you need to live, just know that you are not alone and we all struggle with the guilt around that, but you have got to give yourself permission to do things your way, because no two humans are alike, we are all individual.

Holly: That’s the thing and I think part of the challenge is finding what is right for you, finding the training schedule that works for you, finding the lifestyle that works for you, the work schedule, the business schedule. You can look at other people, and you can try what they are doing, but you ultimately need to really pay attention to yourself, and your body, and your energy and figure out what works for you and that is what makes it so difficult, you know they are recipes, like I said, you can model other people, but you ultimately need to make your own recipe.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely.

Holly: So what would you do differently to prevent the burnout if you could go back in time?

Sarah: So yeah, I have been thinking about this, and for me personally, I wouldn’t go back in time and prevent it because I needed this lesson so badly, it was just part of my life that I needed to learn this and I needed to learn it the hard way, because I have a stubborn streak. With that said, if I was giving advice to somebody else in that way, ‘what would I do differently?’, then It would have been about learning to listen to myself a lot sooner, not giving into the guilt and the negative self-beliefs and the pressure from society that you must do things a certain way. Also not being ridiculous about how many hours in the week I had and trying to be some sort of super hero, and again this is all led from a dark place, it has all led from guilt and not feeling enough, and not feeling like I deserve a day off. The thing is there are seven days in the week whichever way you come at them, and you can’t work all seven days of the week, you cannot, we are not built for that, you have to have rest days. So yeah, I would not have been trying to run four marathons in a year, and running my freelance business the way that I was, at the same time. It was probably too much to just run that business, take the marathons out it, that was probably too much on its own, so trying to throw all that extra sport at it, it was ridiculous. And something really key, that nobody told me, and I had to figure this out and I want everyone to know, sitting and working at your desk job is not a rest day. If your brain is working, then your adrenal response system is working, and your whole body and immune system is stressed. So your legs might be getting a rest, but actually your body as a whole, as a system, isn’t having a rest, so it is not a rest day. A rest day is sitting on the sofa watching tv, or reading a book, not dealing with work and yeah, there is a huge difference. I used to think that I could run a marathon – I actually did this, I ran the London Marathon, 2018, hottest London marathon on record, it took me six-and-a-half hours, I was so dehydrated that I didn’t pee between the start village and going to bed at 10 o’clock at night, that is how dehydrated I was! Monday morning I agreed to do a press interview, so 10am, on Monday morning, I have got this woman on the phone asking me questions. She asked me how old I was and I couldn’t remember. It was such a bad interview it didn’t even get published, she axed it in the end. And then Tuesday, the next day, I am shoving myself up the stairs to a client’s office to go and do a day of in-house work. Sitting at a desk is not rest or recovery, I learned that the hard way.

Holly: That is such an important thing to point out, because I think I tend to compartmentalise, because I time block everything in my calendar, and it is all colour coded, so I have got work time blocked, and fitness and running time blocked in other colours, and I think, ‘oh if I am not doing fitness stuff every single day, that means the days that I don’t do them are rest days’, even if I might be doing lots of other stuff, so that is a good lesson to hear.

Sarah: Yeah, definitely, you need absolute nothing time, you really do, we all do.

Holly: We do. I think that is why I get so stressed, because I tend to fill up my weekends with stuff, I have different courses that I am doing, and running, and other stuff and I keep doing stuff on the weekends or I will do a Work-cation, and then I feel exhausted because I haven’t had a weekend of nothingness in a long time. I think I really need to learn to either keep one day a week, or figure out how much I need, but schedule in what I call my ‘lazy days’ where I just sit and do nothing.

Sarah: Yeah, I think you have to treat them like an essential practice, as essential as anything else: as work, as doing the housework, otherwise you will guilt yourself out of it. This is why chronic fatigue has been the ultimate leveller for me, it stopped me from doing all the fidgeting about that I would have done on a “rest” day. At my worst – I am a lot better now – I wouldn’t be able to hoover more than one room at a time because I would get so tired. And that stopped me because previously I would be, ‘okay it is a rest day I am going to chill out, so all I am going is this short list of things: groceries, clean the entire house, go and feed some cats in the neighbourhood, go and do x, y and z. I will just write one blog post, but it is not really work’, you know, I would, give myself a list of tasks on a Sunday. And when I got to the point when I physically couldn’t because doing one thing, like hoovering one room, or cooking myself one meal, took everything out of me, that’s when I learned what rest is. And now that I am getting my energy back, my job is to not run away with myself again, but to go, ‘okay, it is fine if I do nothing for an hour. It is good if I do nothing for an hour’.   

Holly: It is productive to do nothing for an hour because it gives your body a chance to rest. So we have been talking a lot about learning to listen to yourself and listen to your body but what does this mean? What is it that we need to pay attention to?

Sarah: That’s an interesting question, it works on so many levels, what we need to pay attention to. On the physical, here and now, 3D world level, you need to listen to what your body is screaming at you sometimes, so if your legs are tired, if your ankles are sore, if you are injured and you have been ignoring it. I am terrible for ignoring my body, I have been ignoring food intolerances for years as well, just thinking, ‘I will just take an antihistamine and eat what I want’. I am terrible for that! So on the physical level it is about listening to you body, but then it goes much deeper as well, because there is also the emotional stuff. So not just stop yourself from doing too much, but understand why you are doing too much in the first place, what is the unconscious, or the subconscious, pattern that you are playing out? Whose voice is it in the back of your head telling you that you are lazy and you should get up and do the housework even though you have just done a 20 mile hike. I think I had to go a lot deeper before I started to correct my behaviours because just telling myself not to clean the house wasn’t enough, and ultimately it wouldn’t work because I would get up and do it. So yeah, it is understanding why I felt like that and started to do a bit of work on myself and for me that work has really come in the form of writing, I have been writing a lot more personal stuff recently and sharing on medium.com and that has been really good for me to just think it out and get it on paper and looking at it and having other people reading it and commenting on it, has made me go, ‘ah yeah, this is actually really understandable’, when you look at what was driving me to behave that way, and now that I understand it I can undo it a bit.

Holly: Do you have any plans to write a book about this journey?

Sarah: Yes, I have already named it, my Instagram is called Running with My Mind, so it makes sense that the book will be the same thing. But yes, absolutely.

Holly: Oh good.

Sarah: It will be sort of a part b to my first book,The Musings of an Elective Orphan, which is where I wrote about my childhood, I had a difficult childhood, abusive parents. I left home at 16. And then I talk about growing up without having a parent keeping an eye on you and all the silly things that I did and I also talk about that first marathon as well and the bad marriage that led to it. So I thought it would be a good part b, a follow up to that book, but I will focus a bit more on the running.

Holly: Oh good, good! So what are your plans to prevent burnout once you start training for marathons again?

Sarah: Well I really feel like I am quite a different version of me now, I am Sarah 2.0. Now that I have started to peel away the layers, and really look at the psychology behind why I was doing what I was doing, I don’t feel that I could do that to myself again. So I have changed my way of working, I haven’t yet started to train again, but when I do start to train, I will be very, very, careful and it needs to be a balance. Where I used to do that thing, a bit like what you were describing, with the colour blocking in the diary, I used to plan out my work, and it was a very full week of work, and then I would plan out my running in a different colour and layer them over each other. I need to stop doing that, and I think that everything needs to be one colour in a sense, like I am either doing something or I am not doing something, if you know what I mean?

Holly: Yeah, yeah.

Sarah: So my diary needs to be, right it is activity time, and that activity might be work, or it might be training, and then it is not activity time, which is I am doing nothing: I am not cleaning the house, I am not writing a blog post, I am not going for a run. To make sure that I do actually have nothing time, because that is really important. And yeah, just being sensible, and being much more aware of myself now and probably getting my friends to keep an eye on me as well, just in case I go off the rails again! But yeah, my running friends are very aware of how I have got myself into this state, so I think they will be keeping an eye on me as well, and that is very important, because we can kind of kid ourselves, when it is just you, you can kid yourself: oh I am not doing that, it is just an extra marathon, I am just going to do an ultra this year, it is okay! Yeah, I am going to be supervised, which I think will help.

Holly: Good! So when you get back into racing, how many races are you planning to run your next year? What do you think is the right frequency for you, at least starting out?

Sarah: I think the right frequency for me is going to be one marathon a year, until I can prove to myself that I am responsible. I have got a half marathon planned for next Spring and then, if we are able to get a place, and I don’t know if we will be able to, but a client of mine asked me if I would do the Nice to Cannes marathon with her, in November 2021. So if we can get a place, I am very tempted to do that, it is a whole year away from now, it will be her first marathon, so I will have the pressure off me to try and perform because I will just be pacing my friend which will be lovely and we will be talking and enjoying the sights, and I think it is largely downhill as well – so that sounds really good to me. But more than that, what I wanted to say, I don’t think it is a case of how many marathons in isolation it is a case of how many marathons compared to how much working I am doing. So I need to stay flexible, where I used to plan my racing calendar a year in advance, I would get super excited, just spank my credit card and book a load of events and be like, ‘right I am going to hit all of these!’. And then I would have this sort of list of things to hold myself accountable to which was actually, it sounds motivating but it was actually something to punish myself with, because: I couldn’t miss a race because I had spent money on it, and there were no refunds and I had put all this training in, and I have to do it, and I have told everyone on Instagram that I am going to do it. So that was making me do all these races that I wasn’t healthy enough for, so I think I am going to be more flexible, I am going to try and leave booking until the last minute and play it by ear depending on how much work I have got, because that is what I got wrong before. So I am going to be looking at overall activity, not just keeping work and running separate, I need to do think of it is all as doing and not doing.

Holly: Yeah, how it fits together.

Sarah: Yeah.

Holly: Yeah. So what is the most important thing that you would say that you have learned from this journey.

Sarah: It really is the mental side of things, I have learned a lot about the body and training and sports and recovery, but yeah, nothing you couldn’t learn from reading a couple of good books. The biggest lesson has been the mental and the emotional side of it, and it is kind of a bit spiritual as well because humans have this innate drive for purpose and, for me, I wasn’t getting enough purpose from my work, so I was pushing myself to do extra curricula activities to get my purpose, and that was quite addictive so I was doing more and more and more. I think learning that I needed to find more purpose in my work by shifting my work to be just more of what I really care about, that has given me more balance – yeah, it is really that. Also understanding what was driving me, it wasn’t just a pure love for running or an obsession with getting marathon medals, it was this darker aspect of ‘you are lazy, you shouldn’t need to take a whole day off to sit on the sofa, blah blah blah…’ it was all of that stuff it was the voice of my grandmother in my head telling me that I was lazy (or whoever it is for you, I am sure that everyone has got someone in their childhood memory who echoes about and says negative things about their career choices, we have all got that!).  Yeah coming to terms with all that has been the biggest lesson for me because now I understand myself a lot better.

Holly: Excellent, so what would you say are your top tips for other people so that they can pursue their physical, and other, interests and prevent burnout?

Sarah: Yes, so I guess this is just a bit of a summary for you guys then. So you must schedule rest days, you can’t just think rest will happen, it won’t, because something will get you up, you know, the cat will throw up on the rug and you will get up and clean it and you will be like, ‘while I am up I will do some more cleaning’. You have got to really be strict with yourself about rest time. Working, sitting down, isn’t resting. Your legs are getting a rest but the rest of your body isn’t, your brain, your adrenal access, you are still wearing yourself out, this is where adrenal fatigue comes from, I am sure of it. Also supplements and caffeine are not substitutes for rest and sleep. I tried to push through on supplements and caffeine and I got worse. And there is no right or wrong as well for how many races you can do each year, whatever your distance is, it is entirely personal, and one year won’t be like another, it will depend on whatever else is going on in your life, if you are moving house, if you are getting divorced, if you are going through any sort of emotional upheaval, that takes its toll on you as well and you have got to factor in the time to just rest and recover.

Holly: Yeah, I agree, and I am learning now from this conversation I am realising that I need to schedule in my rest days and really make sure that they happen, because if something is not in the calendar then it doesn’t happen and I feel like I need to fill it up with something else (because I have got all this time, I can do a new thing, or I can do another thing), and rest needs to be a thing, a valid thing to do.

Sarah: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean if you struggle with that maybe there is a mental trick you can use like renaming it, maybe you don’t call it ‘rest’, maybe you call it something else, if it feels less icky to call it something else, but yeah you do have to schedule it in.

Holly: Yeah, but it is a hard balance to find, because sometimes I wonder if I am pushing myself enough, and at the same time I feel I push myself too hard, so how do you think people can find that balance?

Sarah: So as to not give you something fluffy and unhelpful like, ‘oh it is entirely individual, listen to your body’, how about something mathematical, how about the 80:20 Pareto’s principle? That applies to everything in the world ever. I don’t know why but it works for everything, whether it is economics, maths, marketing, dieting, whatever it is, 80% go for it, 20% sit on the sofa, that is a good balance. I have been thinking about the 80:20 rule recently, I have been writing about in terms of marketing and it makes me think about where else in life it can apply to, because it is not a marketing tool, it came from a land study in Italy. If you guys don’t know what I am talking about just go and Google ‘Pareto’s principle’ and Wikipedia will explain it to you. It is a sort of magic ratio, I don’t know why it works but if you spend four fifths working really hard, I think you should spend one fifth of your time chilling out and that seems like a really sensible balance to me.     

Holly: That sounds good, I will have to go and calculate my calendar now! {laughing} I think my calendar is 98% full of stuff and 2% yeah…I really need to do a calendar overhaul, this is the time of year when I do it, so this is an absolutely perfect time of year for this conversation! So thank you so much for joining us today, this has been such a useful conversation not just for me personally, but for everyone listening. This doesn’t just apply to running it applies to hiking, cycling, working, whatever it is that you do in life, most people aren’t just sitting doing nothing or reading a book, this applies to every part of our lives, so thank you for this. So where can people find you online?

Sarah: So I would really love to have some more Instagram followers, so if you are on Insta come and follow me @runningwithmymind. I am on YouTube as a runner, and I have got a marketing channel, it is a bit boring and dry. I have got a running channel, I haven’t uploaded anything for ages, because I have been ill and not running, but if you are morbidly curious to see my gradual decline into burnout there are some old running videos, just go onto YouTube, if you look for ‘Running With My Mind Richmond Park Marathon’, you will see the last marathon I did before I got burnt out and then it is all downhill from there.

Holly: Okay, I will look for that, and link to it in the show notes, so we can all see the signs of burnout.

Sarah: Yeah in action!

Holly: That’s really, really rough, but I am glad it got you coming out the other side and you have learned from it and hopefully will be able to avoid it in the future.

Sarah: Well, as an author you know it is all excellent book material, so I am sure that I will cash in on this one day, it has been worth it! {laughing}

Holly: {laughing} It is one of those things where you look back in time and think: I am really glad I went through that, that was great. But when you are in the middle of it, it is like, ‘ah this is crappy’.

Sarah: Yes that is a good analogy for a marathon!

Holly: {laughing} Yes it is.

Sarah: You hate it until 26 miles and the last 0.2 miles you are like, ‘yeah I love running!’. Then you get a marathon and a beer and you go home.

Holly: That happened to me on my 10k, it was so hard, because it was so hilly, I was thinking ‘when is it going to be over, it is only 10k’, and then it was over, and I ran through the little finish sign, and I was like ‘oh, I want more!’

Sarah: Yeah, it is weird like that isn’t it?

Holly: Oh these are all good lessons for life. Anyway, thank you so much for joining us and thank you for sharing your tips and everyone please follow Sarah on Instagram, check out her YouTube and check out her Medium, we will link to that in the show notes. You have got some really interesting stories to tell, so thank you.

Sarah: Thank you for having me.

Holly: I hope you found that interesting and useful, please drop me a line and let me know what you thought about this week’s episode. You can email me at: [email protected] or find me online and get in touch there.

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