The year 2013 went tits up in Rhal-land and turned out to be one of the toughest, most painful and yet necessary years of my life. After battling with poverty, injury, isolation, heartbreak and relocating from Scotland back to the greatest city in the world, although I learned a lot about myself, something has to change. As the year of hard knocks draws to a close, it’s time to sort my shit out and make some plans.

Early adventurer

Early adventurer

Returning to London has been bittersweet. I am so happy to be close to my friends and family and ecstatic to be back running after months of injury. But I’m also haunted by a sense of failure, sad to leave some special people behind and frustrated at reaching this point in my life (34.5) with no fucking clue what’s going on.

I always assumed I’d have a house, husband, career and gaggle of chubby babies by now. The truth is, the most expensive thing I possess is a pink BMX and my wardrobe consists largely of £3.99 H&M Lycra miniskirts. I live off hummus and I don’t know how I’m going to pay my rent next month. To that end, I’ve decided to write a plan of my hopes and aspirations for the year ahead. Behold the launch of the official year of Rhalou. I hereby give you all permission to remind me to stick to the plan if July rolls around and I’m still slogging out in budget Lycra and licking hummus instead of making something of my life.

Get a job
Okay I admit it, I suck at freelancing. I’m a woman of routine. I like being in an office every day, wearing actual clothes and interacting with interesting people. I’ve been freelance for 18 months now, which basically means I’ve lived in pyjamas for over a year. In 2014 I would like to get a well-paid, exciting, challenging and fulfilling job with a progressive company where my writing and editing skills are put to good use. I would also like to earn enough money to get taxis home from the pub instead of shuffling drunkenly on to the bloody night bus at 4am every Sunday.

Get ripped
After taking time out due to injury it’s been a long slow climb back to fitness, but in a funny way rediscovering running has been like falling in love all over again. All the clichés about coming back stronger are true. When you get knocked back, if you’ve got true grit you come back fighting and this time I’m determined to get it right. I don’t give a rat’s arse about speed, PBs or elusive ultra fitness. I run because I want to be healthy, happy and look good in hotpants. I’m determined not to get injured again, and to that end I’ve taken up yoga, returned to the weight’s room and I refuse to run faster than the speed of conversation until I am ready. Watch this space.

Seek out adventure
Moving to the Scottish mountains was a baptism of fire. I absolutely loved the wilderness, but at the same time I realised I need friends, pubs, H&M and Starbucks to sustain me as a human being. Even the most beautiful, ethereal and majestic countryside in the world sucks arse if you’ve got no one to share it with, so I came home. I haven’t turned my back on the mountains though. Since being back in the city I’ve realised I need both in my life. I want to be a city girl who buggers off to the wilderness for a mountain fix every few weeks. Who fancies a road trip?

Write that book
Despite trying to write one since I was six, I have never finished a book (in my own name). Aside from the whole moving to the Scottish mountains episode, there are some cool stories I should probably tell you. There was that time I lived in a commune, or when I climbed the fence at Glastonbury when I was only 14, or the gay millionaire my granny married, or that time I was an extra in a porn film about zombies. Please remind me to write that book.

Be content
I’ve been cursed with an adventurous streak which compels me to shake up my entire life every couple of years and turn everything on its head. I’ve walked away from countless friends, jobs, homes, relationships and pets without so much as a backward glance. This may sound fun and reckless, but it doesn’t get me any closer to living the conventional dream and having a stable income so I can pay for those elusive late-night taxis. In 2014 I will learn to cherish what I already have; loyal and brilliant friends, a family that loves me, a city to call my home and legs that can run and run and run.

Fear not folks, my profound ramblings about my rock star life disguised as a running blog are not about to veer off into the culinary realm. I might start to post the occasional recipe because I want to seem like a grown-up lady, but I solemnly promise not to attempt to metamorphose into a food blogger. Although I eat food regularly, sometimes even six times a day, and I’ve even been known to write articles about it, I’m not going to pretend to know what the hell to do with it.

I like food. It tastes nice (sometimes), and I enjoy the sense of occasion associated with eating. I love lolling over dinner in dimly lit restaurants, slugging red wine and casting provocative eyes at my beloved (although that’s quite tricky in our local strip-lit Chinese). But if left to my own devices, I confess I will happily eat Tescos 24p bean soup, pitta bread and hummus, every single day. I’ve been known to survive off this very same meal contentedly every night for months. Sometimes I jazz it up with a raw carrot, but only on special occasions. This is not a sadistic weight-loss initiative; it’s because I’m lazy and joyless.

If the scientists invented a robot that could press a button and inject bean soup and hummus straight into my veins so I didn’t have to bother heating it up, I’d opt in. I’m not sure why I’m such a killjoy. I was raised on delicious vegetarian whole food by my mum and had a healthy attitude to eating as a kid. But when I’m on my own I really couldn’t give a toss about cooking. I’d rather stare at a wall than prepare a tasty feast for one. Conversely, give me some mouths to feed and I love nothing more than cooking up a (meat-free) storm in the kitchen. I will merrily spend hours baking pie, roasting vegetables, and concocting obscure frittata parodies, but only if there’s someone there to feed it to. Otherwise it’s ding dinners all the way. (Microwave. Ding!)

So anyway, since my recent exile to the Scottish wilderness, as I now share my life with a red-blooded male, I’ve taken up cooking again. Although he’s a big braw tattooed Scotsman who looks like he eats his meat straight off the bone, Ultraboy is for the most part vegetarian, which makes life a fuck of a lot easier. Any veggie who’s ever dated a hardcore carnivore will know that despite your best efforts, your relationship is doomed. If you favour plant-based food, you just can’t share your life with a man who considers meat and two meat a staple diet and refuses to accept any form of vegetable as a viable alternative. You’ll only succeed if you’re rich enough to employ two chefs and own a Smeg fridge big enough to fit all the opposing food in (I always wanted a red Smeg fridge).

Despite routinely pushing his body to its limits, Ultraboy thrives on a predominantly plant-based diet and makes really good curry and all sorts of cool strange things to do with celeriac. (A weird alien-like root vegetable that tastes a bit like parsnip, which for some reason unbeknownst to me Ultraboy is singularly obsessed with). So we share cooking and take it in turns to make big sexy meals for each other that we usually devour in front of True Blood, Walking Dead, or Falling Skies. Basically stick me in front of anything gruesome featuring supernatural beasts feasting on each other’s brains and I’m happy. This is probably weird behaviour for a vegetarian. Don’t judge me.

As we’re the proud parents of 10 eccentric fluffy chickens, you’d think more of our meals would involve eggs, but the ladies have been off the lay of late. Aside from the odd Chinese, all of our banquets are based on beans, pulses and happy green vegetables. (Except for when Ultraboy’s out of town that is. Then it’s cheap soup and bumper-sized hummus all the way baby). Not because we’re compulsive dieters. We both just prefer whole food. I was raised that way and Ultraboy swears by it for fuelling him up mountains. I’d secretly love to be whippet thin, but God built me this way and she knew what she was doing in the design room. I eat well and exercise shit loads and I still have a big round bum, so who am I to argue? In order to shave inches off that booty I’d need to live off air and then I’d be a grumpy bitch.

There is one exception to our healthy eating regime, and it comes in the form of what I like to call ‘stress baking’. Since moving to the country, when the pressure rises, in true farmer’s wife fashion I’ve started taking to the kitchen to ease the tension. Weirdly, if I’m in a hellabitch mood, a good hour of baking makes me feel infinitely better. Pretending to be Nigella by licking raw ingredients off my fingertips provocatively adds to the enjoyment. The woman is the essence of sexual Zen.

The problem with stress baking is the stress eating associated with all the sugary goods you’ve just produced. So to save my ass from getting any bigger (I get fat just sniffing muffins) I’ve been experimenting with healthy cakes. This is secretly bollocks, there’s no such thing as healthy cakes and anyone who says so is lying. But sprinkle a bit of hippy shit in your cake mix and it mysteriously removes all the guilt. So without further ado, I would like to introduce my first ‘healthy’ recipe to you…

Banana Badass
Stick badass on the end of anything and it implies it will make you run like a wild cat. It really won’t. But the addition of flaxseed will make your eyes bright and your blood flow like a horny vampire. Honest.

Tastes better than it looks

Ingredients
2 large or 3 medium very ripe bananas that have been festering in your handbag/fruit bowl all week.
4oz butter.
4oz Demerara sugar.
6oz self raising flour.
2oz oats.
2 chicken eggs or one duck egg (sounds creepy, but duck eggs are creamy and fun).
2oz milled flaxseed (available in all good hairy hippy supermarkets).
2 handfuls of crushed nuts.
1 handful of mixed dried fruit.

Method
Heat the oven to gas mark 4; 180C.
Grease a loaf tin.
Mash the bananas until they’re sort of mushy but still chunky.
Cream the butter and sugar together and mix in the eggs.
Mix in the bananas. Add the flour, oats and flaxseed, followed by nuts, fruit and anything else vaguely healthy looking lying around the kitchen.
Scrape into the loaf tin and bake for 40 minutes. Then lower the temperature to gas mark 2; 150C and cook for a further 30 minutes.

Eat hot or cold with big mugs of tea and experience an unparalleled running Zen that’ll make you praise the day you stumbled across my blog.

Please note: If your Banana Badass tastes disgusting, makes you ill, or provokes vampiric urges, The House of Rhalou accepts no responsibility.

I’ve been an impoverished magazine journalist for the best part of a decade. Despite working for a variety of magazines, the most valuable lesson I ever learned about writing actually came from my beloved grandmother Verily Anderson. Not the sprinter, the other granny, whose name I have tattooed across my back to remind me to be more badass. (It’s freaking huge, I know. It wasn’t supposed to be that big, but a well-tattooed gentleman friend influenced me somewhat on ink day).

Verily badass

Verily means truly. Verily truly was the distilled essence of badass. In the 1950s she’d waltz into any public bar and order a pint of ale long before it was considered socially acceptable for women to drink alone. She also had five kids, travelled the world aged 85 with her youngest granddaughter (me) and wrote books for a living. She finished her last book the day before she died aged 95.

The only literary advice she ever gave me was ‘never start anything with I’ as apparently it sets a self-indulgent tone. Oops. Oh well, maybe it’s okay to be a little bit self-indulgent every once in a while. Considering Granny Verily’s other stock saying was, ‘When things get bad, go to the pub. When things get really bad, throw a party’ I don’t think she’d have disapproved of the occasional moment of self-indulgence all that much.

So to that end, I’m going to unashamedly boast about my latest article in Women’s Running magazine. You’d think I’d get used to seeing my name in print, but I still get completely overexcited on press day. It’s a fantastic feeling to see my words on a big shiny page (minus all the fucks. Magazine editors always edit out the F word if you try and sneak it in) and know that at least a couple of people in the world will read it.

This month feels exceptionally exciting because, although I was on staff at Women’s Running for nearly three years, this is my first published article since becoming a FREELANCE JOURNALIST (sorry for shouting but it’s well grown up and scary) so it feels like a big deal.

Read me baby

My latest article is also about a very newsworthy subject, vegetarian running! Everyone should go veggie. Not because I give a shit about the baby animals or environmental impact (although I really do) but because it would make eating out and dinner parties much easier for those of us that choose to eschew animalia. I always feel like such a loser in restaurants when I have to ask if there’s anything on the menu without a mum or a face. Plus my brother-in-law Jay Scrimshaw is a head chef who specialises in offal, which sucks balls as I never get to taste his cooking. Christmas day is a logistical nightmare. If only they all liked quinoa and alfalfa sprouts as much as I do.

It’s also nice to have it in print that being a vegetarian will have absolutely no bearing whatsoever on your ability to run a marathon. True story. But I won’t ruin the plot, go and buy the sexy running mag now so they commission me to write loads more, sales pitch over. Who fancies a quick pint of ale?

Week two of Operation Rhalou in the wilderness and I seem to be settling into country life okay. Thankfully last week’s Chickengate was solved by a quick visit to the local donkey sanctuary that doubles up as a chicken petting zoo. They kindly took Monty the evil ginger cock off our hands in exchange for three considerably less threatening Silkie chickens, who I’ve collectively christened Chaka Khan.

Chaka Chicken Khan

Curiously, since we waved goodbye to Monty, his fellow rooster Freddie has stepped up to alpha mode and started lording it about the garden. What is it about men? Even in chicken form must they be forever locked in an archaic battle for supremacy?

I was hoping to have something a bit more rock ‘n’ roll to blog about this week than poultry. Life may be quiet in the country, but chickens alone are not enough to sustain a blog. Unless you write a blog specifically about chickens that is, in which case, my apologies, chickens are great. My intention was to write about running, but I haven’t done very much, due to a self-diagnosed IT band injury. But arguably self-diagnosis and doing sod all about it definitely makes me a typical runner, even if I’m not currently doing very much running.

I should probably stay in rival chicken bloggers good books anyway, because I suspect I may be inadvertently developing a chicken fetish. And since writing exclusively about running at Women’s Running magazine for nearly three years, maybe it’s time to spread my wings and write about something a bit more existential. Like birds.

If you don’t have anyone else to chat to, chickens certainly do start to take on a whole new level of importance. Those feathered friends have become my family. I eat most of my meals in their company, I study them obsessively (they’re like mini dinosaurs!) and even meditate amongst the mystic chickens. Okay that’s a lie, I find it impossible to sit still for that long, but their mere presence is quite meditative. If only chickens could run 10K at a comfortable pace, or bitch about boys over a glass of Merlot on Thursday nights.

Anyway before I change the name of this blog to City Chicken in the Sticks, let’s get back to the job in hand. The next obstacle in Rhalou versus country life is only marginally less pathetic than being scared of maverick poultry. This week I have mostly been grappling with the fear of being alone. Not in a spiritual sense (I welcome spiritual enlightenment, hence the bold move to the wilderness) but the fear of actually being alone, all by myself, all night long, in the middle of nowhere, with nobody to hear me scream…

Ultraboy is off to run a race in the highlands this weekend, leaving me home alone with the chickens. Ordinarily I’d relish the opportunity for a bit of Rhalou-time, so I could secretly watch One Born Every Minute, get drunk, eat Rocky Road and paint my toes pirate red at the kitchen table. But that was when I lived in a flat surrounded by six billion people, so I could still hear my neighbours farting through the walls. There’s being alone, and then there’s being alone, in the wilderness, with no car and no sense of direction, and a rusty torture chamber in the cellar. Okay I lied about the torture chamber bit too, Ultraboy gets his kicks from torturing me in a hill running sense, but the rest is all true. I have to spend one night on my own in the house on the hill in the middle of nowhere in Scotland, and I am shitting myself.

I know the crime rate in The Borders is considerably lower than London. Plus after finding a dead body in my back garden in Hackney a couple of years ago and witnessing a shooting in London Fields (both true) I’ve probably used up my horror quota for a lifetime. But combine the house, the hill, the rain, the woman alone and the wilderness, and my weekend definitely possesses all the ingredients for a classic horror film. Except for the gang of horny young teens on spring break required to get picked off one-by-one by the serial killer/monster/tribe of zombies in the lead up to my gory finale, but that’s just a minor plot detail.

I’ve seen The Evil Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre enough times to know slutty redheads rarely make it out of the woods alive. The surviving role is almost always saved for the brunette. And when the aliens do land in the garden, I can’t even run away! My IT band injury is practically begging for an axe-wielding murderer to chase me limping through the undergrowth. I’m just thankful I’m not a blonde; they always get chopped up before the intermission.

Arguably I could just jump on the train to London, or call my Dad who lives 20 miles up the road, or beg Ultraboy to take me to the highlands to share a tent/car/hostel with his sweaty ultra runner mates (sexy). But as shit scared as I am about being on my own in the arse crack of nowhere with nothing but a flock of chickens to protect me from the antichrist, I need to suck it up and be alone at some point, so it might as well be now. If I’m really going to morph into a fully-functioning country girl, I’m going to have to man-up and I’m going to have to do it fast.

If anyone reading this does happen to be a serial killer/monster/tribe of zombies, please don’t come to The Borders and kill me in a complex yet visually exhilarating way this weekend. But do feel free to come and visit! I’d love to have a guest or two for the weekend. We could have a nice cup of tea and talk to the chickens. Chickens are really great.

Hello and thanks for reading what I hope will be the first of many blogs about running, disco, rogue chickens, romance, moonlight and my adventures in the hills.

After nearly three years, several hundred miles, a dozen halves, two wholes and one ultra marathon, I’m sad to announce that, as of next week, I’ll be stepping down as Online Editor at Women’s Running magazine. It’s been an amazing journey, I’ve made some great friends along the way and I’ll be very sad to leave. But due to a series of events that led me to one rather handsome ultra runner, I’ve decided to quit the rat race and emigrate to a little cottage in rural Scotland…

Like most good stories, this one begins with a girl and a boy and a bit of romance. But to set the scene, I probably need to go back a little further. Back to the days before running and carbo loading and compression gear consumed my life. Bear with me; this may take a while…

It all started long ago in a little city called London. I was living in a house with a boy. Not THE boy I might add, but another boy, who it turned out wasn’t destined to be the boy for me. But ever the optimist, at the time I thought maybe he was. I was slogging away for peanuts editing Penthouse Forum magazine at a grimy publishing house in East London, believing my destiny was spread-eagled (teehee) before me and all I had to do was hang on.

I spent my days penning articles on S&M, interviewing adult babies and reviewing saucy porn films, and my nights pretending to be happy with the wrong boy. Having been estranged from my Dad for nearly 20 years, I suspect I was lacking decent male role models. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that perhaps I deserved more than this boy was capable of giving.

Fortunately Lady Fate knew that my fortunes lay elsewhere. So she decided to step in and clear the decks for me in a very painful, dramatic but ultimately necessary fashion, so that I could start all over again (if only I’d seen it this way at the time).

As with all good life changing events, in a trilogy of drama I lost my boyfriend, my job and my house in the same week. They do say bad luck comes in threes. Homeless, jobless, dumped and utterly distraught, I relied on the kindness of friends while pondering the impossibility of my utterly fucked up life. But then, just when I needed it the most, a little thing called running came into my life…

At this point I should probably make a confession. Before the whole running epiphany started, I wasn’t remotely interested in fitness. I’d spent thirty years veering between chubby, skinny or depressed depending on the state of my love life. The only thing I hated more than running, was my fat arse (go figure). But then one day, a particularly awful day when I had no idea what the hell I was doing with my life or where my next meal was coming from, a friend told me about a job on a new running magazine, and that’s when everything changed.

To prepare for the job interview, two days before, I tentatively took up running. I say running, I hobbled round the block a few times, hated every second of it and showed up at the interview swearing blind that I was an avid runner with a bright future on the magazine. Against the odds I got the job, so I was forced to keep on pretending to be a runner.

At around this time I also lost an important uncle to cancer and a much-loved granny to old age. Struggling to comprehend the shitty cards I’d been dealt, I decided to focus all of my energies on pretending to be good at running. Right through the deepest darkest winter I plodded around the park, gradually building up strength, stamina, and mental determination. I ran through the stresses of house hunting, heartache, bereavement and injury. I would not advise the last one. I had a particularly nasty arm operation following a run in with my bicycle and a black cab, and tried to continue running with my arm in a sling. (Turns out you actually need all of your limbs to run. Who knew?)

It didn’t happen over night, but I gradually fought the sweat, the tears and some rather persistent shin splints to become a runner. Despite what I told my boss, I wasn’t immediately a die hard fan; running can be tough going for the best of us, and I found it particularly rough on my spindly knees (and don’t get me started on the dodgy shoulder) but I kept on going and every week I got a little bit faster and grew a little bit stronger. I ran through the rain, I ran in the dark, I ran weighed down by tears and bone heavy with sadness, regret and fear. But even during my darkest hour when I didn’t know what life was going to throw at me next, I kept on running.

I have a lot to thank the open road for. I shared my heart with the sky every night and whispered my problems to my pounding feet, until gradually, one step at a time, my fears began to dissipate. And to my surprise, when I’d told my story to the road a hundred times until even the trees were dog tired of hearing it, I was left with nothing but boundless energy and miles of unchartered territory ahead.

It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that these profound running moments all occurred within the 5K circumference of Victoria Park. Running can be an amazing, life-changing, moving meditation, capable of healing all of life’s woes, but it’s still bloody hard. The big miles didn’t come until much later.

But what did happen quite quickly was the impact running had on every other aspect of my life. I discovered that if I was running well, everything else in my life seemed to fall into place. Before long I had a nice flat, a great group of friends and a job involving writing about my new favourite hobby all day long.

As is the case for most runners, my regular plod round the park soon got tedious, so the pursuit of running events took over and within a year I’d conquered my first marathon. Many people complain about the arduous side of marathon training, but I discovered that I respond really well to structure, plus I often need an excuse to hit the road, so I set about signing up to every race that came my way.

But running can be a solitary sport and as most of my friends were party kids, when my miles began to increase, I started to get lonely. But then one night I met Run Dem Crew, a collective of East London runners who take to the streets en masse every Tuesday night, and my fate was sealed. The first time I ran with the crew, I felt like I’d come home. Run Dem Crew really shaped my running, and my favourite hobby quickly blossomed into a love affair. It’s more of a family than a running club and I feel blessed to have met and ran with so many amazing and inspirational people.

After a summer of running fun, that September I was due to review The Great Scottish Run for Women’s Running magazine. It was an important weekend for more than one reason. I was also going to stay with my Dad, who lives in The Scottish Borders and was just out of hospital after having a heart bypass operation. We were in the very early stages of rebuilding our fragile relationship after twenty years apart, and I was nervous about seeing him.

And then when I least expected it, I met an interesting gentleman (let’s call him Ultraboy) and once again everything suddenly changed. It’s funny how when life finally feels complete, someone can suddenly appear and knock you off your feet. Ultraboy (an ultrarunner, funnily enough) also lives in The Borders, and kindly offered to pace me round the half marathon. At the time I didn’t realise that in run world ‘can I pace you?’ is the new ‘can I take you out?’

I boldly accepted, and so on a perfect summer’s day in early September, we went on our first date, a half marathon around the streets of Glasgow. I figured if he still fancied me after 13.1 miles of sweat, he had to be a keeper, and I was right.

After nearly a year of running up and down the country, we figured it was time to leap into the void, so I’ve decided to follow my heart, escape the rat race and take on The Borders! The only problem being, I’m a die-hard London girl with no clue about country life and our nearest neighbour is a chicken coop. So will this city chick survive in the wilderness? Watch this space…