“I FELT SICK TO MY STOMACH WITH ANXIETY. I NEEDED TO TIE ON MY TRAINERS AND JUST RUN”

WHEN JACKIE WILSON AND HER FAMILY MOVED TO MALAYSIA, LITTLE DID SHE KNOW HER RUNNING WOULD BECOME MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER

On the day I found out I was pregnant with our second child, my husband was offered a promotion. It wasn’t looking like a bad day in terms of good news, apart from the fact that the new job role was in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

After initially laughing in my husband’s face at the ridiculousness of the idea, we spent an evening weighing it all up and decided to go. After all, I was going to be on maternity leave anyway, why not do so in perennial sunshine, in luxury accommodation with a swimming pool and a maid? Cut to a little over four months later and there we were, posing at the foot of the Petronas Towers, in a sheen of sweat and with an overwhelming feeling of ‘What on earth have we done?’

In the years leading up to this moment, I had spent 20 years working in marketing for various food brands, such as Twinings Tea and Cathedral City Cheddar Cheese. We had a daughter, Holly, who was two years old at the time. I had been a runner for around 25 years and absolutely loved it. I found it to be one of the constants in my life that I could always rely on to relieve stress, process my thoughts and generally feel happy.

At first, Malaysia seemed a great place to spend maternity leave – but Jackie soon felt the call of her trainers…

The idea of running as catharsis started at the beginning of my relationship with the sport. In my late teens, my dad suffered two major heart attacks. The fact that he nearly died notwithstanding, he was devastated by the sudden realisation that he was not invincible – as were the rest of the family. We were all petrified by a sudden awareness of the fragility of life. Without telling anyone, Dad started to go out on long walks with our dog as part of his rehabilitation process. There was no reason to ask questions when his walking attire became a little sportier and he started taking an old-school Walkman with him (it was the late 1980s); from our perspective, he was just getting a bit cool. We were all a bit gob-smacked, however, some months later when he returned telling us he had ran five miles without stopping.