The night before my first 100-mile, ultra-marathon race I drank two bottles of wine and went to bed late.
I woke with a hangover, terrified and anxious. Retching and with a pounding head I headed to the start line. There, the sporting elite gathered. Lean, super-fit, focused, high-achieving people; those who relished pushing themselves to the boundaries of human endurance for fun.
Contrary to what you may imagine, I didn’t look out of place.
No one could have guessed I was someone who’d been secretly battling addiction for 20 years. After all, what better place to hide your alcoholism than behind the impressive and physically demanding front of extreme sports?
It was such a brilliant disguise, I almost believed it myself. Running became a measure of my self-worth and proof that I wasn’t ill. I mean, alcoholics don’t run ultra-marathons, do they?
We’ve all heard of the phrase ‘high-functioning alcoholic’. They’re the people who are outwardly successful professionals who challenge the common misconception of addicts as people who exist at the fringes of society, passed out on park benches or decaying in squalid bedsits. I took it to another level.
I had an exciting job for a record label, socialising with A-list stars, while I spent my spare time pushing my body to the limit. I looked great – I was impressive – on the outside.
In 2018, I was a guest on Lorraine Kelly’s breakfast show, after I became the first woman to run 100 miles across the largest frozen lake in Mongolia where temperatures reached minus 40C.
Anyone watching the fresh-faced, fit young woman on the TV sofa that morning never would have guessed she had to open a bottle of wine at 7.30am before going on set to stop her hands shaking. I was living proof that addicts can be anywhere, hiding in plain sight.
Growing up in a relatively poor, working-class family in Dorset during the 1980s, I was around alcohol all the time. The pub was the community nerve centre, and everyone I knew drank. Alcohol meant fun.
But it wasn’t until I went to secondary school that my problems began. I was bright and academic and got a place at the local grammar school, where I was teased mercilessly. With my oversized, second-hand uniform, I was immediately a target for bullies who labelled me ‘skanky’.
Then, when I was 16, my parents’ marriage fell apart, and consequently I hit my sixth-form years in full rebellion mode, drinking tequila with boys in the park and smoking at the bus stop.
Most weekends were spent in a drunken haze and the alcohol made me feel like I finally fitted in. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was desperately struggling with depression and low self-esteem.
Heading to university in London, things started to spiral further. I drank at least six pints of lager a day and made repeated suicide attempts. The drink-related incidents kept mounting up: I was found unconscious on a night bus; I was mugged and sexually assaulted.
But I shrugged it all off and set my sights on a dream job in the music industry while my depression festered away, unmonitored.
At the age of 27 I finally landed a personal assistant role with a record label. I felt, and was constantly told, I was incredibly lucky.
There I was, the ‘skanky’ kid from school, having dinner with Ed Sheeran and sharing a taxi with Keira Knightley. But the truth is I was on an exploitative wage and was seriously unhappy at work.
Yet I was terrified of losing my job because I was so ‘lucky’ and there was a line of people waiting to replace me. This all led to horrendous anxiety, acute paranoia and an exacerbated drinking problem.
I got really good at hiding all-day hangovers, and I played the role of the fun party girl who would do anything to be liked and accepted –especially when drunk. I was constantly petrified I would be exposed as a fraud, and to stop the anxiety I drank more and more.
It didn’t help that heavy drinking was actively encouraged in the music industry. It was rock ‘n’ roll, with drinks at lunchtime, after work, pre-gig, during the gig, the after-show party and into the night.
Relationships were fleeting; no one ever lasted very long. My constant companion was alcohol – there was no room in my life for anything else.
Slowly but surely, I was becoming extremely mentally ill. One morning I woke up in bed covered in my own blood. The house looked like a murder scene, with trails of blood across the hallway into the bathroom. In a drunken stupor, I had fallen into my bedroom mirror and a piece had stuck in my wrist.
I cleaned up and headed to work. It was only when blood started to drip onto my keyboard that I casually told my boss I might need to go to A&E.
Rather than being a wake-up call, this became the norm. I would go for months living on nothing but cigarettes, bananas, crisps and lager, which I proudly called ‘the Amy Winehouse diet’.
It was around this time, at the beginning of my music industry career, that I discovered running. In school I did hardly any sport, but I remembered a doctor suggesting I try running to help with my depression when I was at university.
So one day, when I was feeling incredibly low, I decided to give it a go. I figured it was better than throwing myself under a bus. I ran two miles and it felt amazing. I had a beer to celebrate.
From that point onwards whenever I was feeling wretched, I went for a run. I hated spending time alone with myself when sober, but I could manage my mind when I ran. I felt the best version of myself when I was doing it, and to the outside world it looked like I was sorting myself out. How could I have a drinking problem if I was able to run? It helped me to hide the extent of my addiction and facilitate even more drinking.
I started running more often, trying to calm the thoughts of self-loathing in my head. Within a year I had run the London Marathon – in an impressive 4 hrs 4 mins, and over the course of the next four years I ran 40 marathons and 17 ultra-marathons (races that are any distance longer than a 26-mile marathon).
In any other story, this would be the point where the alcoholic protagonist ‘runs away’ from her addiction and gives up drink for good. Not me. I trained hard and drank even harder.
Running was a numbing agent and a welcome release, but it wasn’t addressing my addiction or my depression. It wasn’t unusual for me to run a marathon on the back of a three-day bender, or to drink warm white wine on the start line.
Miraculously, despite putting my body through years of abuse, I had no physical problems. I kept running faster and further. If I felt a hangover creeping in, I just had another drink, stashing wine bottles in my kit bag.
Eventually my running led to a career change, and I joined an adventure racing company. I ran 135 miles across the oldest desert on earth in Namibia and ran the entire length of the Panama Canal carrying a 35kg pack in 100 per cent humidity.
Ultra-marathon runners train for months and years to prepare their bodies for these extreme challenges, their nutrition carefully planned and managed. I was hungover when we started the Panama expedition. I also felt under enormous pressure as the only female on the trip. The route was hellish and, at one point, we got so severely lost we thought we’d die in the jungle.
Yet, for me, the worst part was living with my own toxic thoughts for days, without alcohol to numb them. All I wanted to do was scratch my skin until it bled. I even thought about drinking the alcohol rub I used to treat my feet.
When we eventually crawled out of the jungle something inside me had changed. I realised my thoughts couldn’t kill me, but my actions could. It was the start of a long road to recovery – a tiny step, but a significant one.
But I hadn’t hit rock bottom just yet. This came more than two years later when I was living in Yorkshire, working in marketing for an adventure racing firm.
By now my work was suffering enormously. I wasn’t hitting targets, and I felt constantly anxious, distracted and scared.
One night I walked up the road drunk, planning to throw myself off the bridge into the path of lorries below. But there was a police car parked nearby so I lost my nerve.
A couple of months later, everything unravelled at work and I broke down. It all happened very quickly. I was driven to my best friend’s house in Somerset, where I finally admitted to myself that I was broken and I had to stop drinking. I spent the next nine weeks recovering, unable to do anything except jigsaw puzzles and sleep. I felt nothing.
Gradually, through the unconditional love of my rescue dog Pickle, I began to feel again.
Day after day she lay there with me, licking tears off my face, somehow telling me she loved me just as I was. I took Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a form of psychotherapy, and began running again. I quit my job and became a running and mindset coach.
I’m now 43 and have been sober for just over three years. Everyone assumes my performance must have soared now I no longer drink, but to be honest running is harder than before.
I can feel every painful step and each pang of hunger – nothing is masking the exhaustion – but being able to feel makes it so worthwhile.
Mentally I am getting stronger. I have strategies to manage my depression, and since becoming sober my anxiety has disappeared. Running did not save me, but it bought my body and mind enough time so that when I was finally ready, I could save myself.
As told to Lily Canter. There Is No Wall by Allie Bailey (£14.95, Vertebrate Publishing) is out now.
If you or anyone you know is at risk of suicide, call the Samaritans for free from a UK phone, completely anonymously, on 116 123 or go to samaritans.org
