Hanny Allston stood on the coastline of the Atlantic Ocean in south-west France. It was 2019, and she was on the cusp of a three-week running adventure along the spine of the Pyrénées. Hanny had 700km ahead of her. It would be an enormous undertaking – physically, mentally and emotionally – but also an incredibly exhilarating one.
“I didn’t really know what it would be like,” she says. “All I knew was there was this long distance between me and the Mediterranean coastline, and it was going to be a huge challenge. It was almost the same thought process I went through with writing the book.”
Prior to her Pyrénées mission, Hanny had spent the best part of a year writing and going through the editing process for her memoir, Finding My Feet: My Story. It is a vibrant and compelling story of the challenges and successes she has experienced thus far – from her incredible sporting achievements in swimming, orienteering and running, to crushing injuries, her beloved father’s attempted suicide, her parents’ marriage breakdown, and struggles with anorexia. (See the Book Club review on page 26).
The two may seem worlds apart, but the process of writing her book and running the Pyrénées shared many similarities: both were physically and emotionally demanding, requiring extreme focus and a methodical, intellectual approach.
“The Pyrénées became a really emotional journey, and I spent many days fluctuating between weeping with joy and bursting into tears,” Hanny says. “I felt guilty I was taking this time out for me. And that was exactly what had happened with writing the book. I started feeling guilty for being tucked away in a little cabin on Mt Wellington, in front of a fire, while everyone was at work, while I lived my journey all over again. Then that passed, like it did in the Pyrénées. In that last week of the Pyrénées, I entered this quiet space where my body, head and emotions
