The text popped up at about 10am on a casual Tuesday in early October.
Running a really long way was something I’d taken for granted, the thing that had (since giving up looking rakish and cool by smoking, aged 29) been my go-to stress-beater. Whatever else was going on, I could always go for a run. I knew the rhythm of training; the familiar tempo of the running seasons.
I used to run marathons before work as my party trick. I once ran a 50k doing nothing but 200m laps of my school field.
It was a thing I’d spent 18 years learning how to do (almost) effortlessly.
More pandemic diaries.
In March 2021, I wrote about the first year or so of the pandemic and added some music I was listening to at the time.
Because, let’s face it, EVERYONE benefits from some 90’s Grebo in their lives!
It was a way for me to process what had happened , and to document the events and emotions before they faded. I’m glad I did, as they now seem like a different time.
So to help me make sense of the months that followed, here’s the next month by month instalment (if only for me).
And, yes, you all can still benefit from some 90’s Grebo in your lives…
April 2021: Mega City Four: Rose Coloured. Back, hopeful; but changed.
The time immediately after the second lockdown is a bit of a mental black hole.
As I mentioned in my earlier ‘pandemic diary’, when my good friend, Phil, commented that ‘we’d all exit this pandemic a little different to how we enter it’, I’d thought it hyperbole. Yet as we headed into the Easter holidays in 2021, the world of education (and life) seemed forever changed.
After every historical shock comes a period of change. In April 2021 (and still now in early 2022) we were grappling with how our response should change. Not just to address the obvious academic need to ‘catch up’, but also to address the (possibly deeper) feelings of dislocation which we had noticed both in the children and in the community more widely.
We settled on 3 priorities for the first 100 days after the return from closure:
- Re-learn routines and behaviours.
- Re-establish academic expectations.
- Re-connect the community.
Again, we turned to technology ‘to make the invisible, visible’.
In the past, behavioural norms (how to move around the school, presentation of work etc etc etc) had been baked into the brickwork – handed down from one year group to the next. But suddenly these had vanished. So we recorded videos on our ‘How to be a Blackhorse Champion’ channel.
Oh, and in April, a cyber attack wiped all our teachers’ data and left us without computers for a fortnight and without any internet connection for a month. Most of the data would never return.
May 2021: Breathless – Nick Cave: Enacting the plan and losing to the tide.
In May, whilst the news obsessed about whether we’d open up in time for summer, in school we were enacting our catch up plan.
Our strategy, written with the help of the fabulous Marc Roland, focused tightly on three things:
- Improving the quality of teaching (the most powerful tool to help children catch up more quickly).
- Tightly targeted intervention: Reading and language support for KS1: focusing on children behind in S&L or phonics; and additional teaching support for Y6 who had the most ground to cover,
- Support vulnerable children: academically & pastorally, removing the barriers that they had encountered due to the pandemic and rebuilding their ability to challenge themselves.
The key for us was to clearly set the parameters and expectation, but to allow staff to fill in the detail with their knowledge of the children. It aimed to capture the creativity they’d developed during the past year.
It worked. Staff focused on overcoming barriers and addressing gaps. Throughout May, there was finally a feeling of forward momentum.
In addition to this, seeds we’d (literally) planted in the cold winter earth had grown, and the first were ready for harvest. As a vehicle to explore the pandemic and our return from it, we planned science and PSHE units around the theme of re-growth. This proved to be an effective vehicle for processing the past year’s events.
This mattered because there was a need to re-connect children with their school. To build a sense of agency and community; a belief that they had the power to alter their futures.
The growth project seemed to achieve this. It gave children the chance to put something in the ground and see it grow. It sounds incredibly simple – it was; but it was what the children needed at that moment to feel that they were in control of their environment.
It was also the first Ultra race of the year (and since March 2020). I’d trained hard and done the mileage needed for the ‘Race the Tide’ 28 mile coastal marathon. I thought it was a bit of an easy warm up race – 28 miles was a distance I’d done many times with ease.
They say pride comes before a fall. In my case it was hubris.
The weather was hot and the (4000ft) cliff climbs brutal. By 20 miles (an easy weekly training run distance) I had to stop to walk. At 23 miles I passed out at an aid station and was driven to a medical tent… then put on a drip and ECG… which concluded my readings were dangerously volatile… and blue-lighted to hospital.
This wasn’t a new experience to me (the same had happened in the London2Brighton 100k on a hot day a couple of years earlier – so I knew what dehydration and heat exhaustion felt like. However, it was new to the Junior Doctor in A&E who had been left alone on a Bank Holiday weekend and who ended up ordering a tube to be fed into my heart…
It was the first time my super-power had landed me in proper trouble.
It was the sign of things to come.
June 2021 Fever 333: Walk through the fire: Delta
June was supposed to be a glorious ‘Freedom Day’ filled return to normality.
But then ‘Delta’ complicated the ‘glorious return to normality’ – and added complexity to an already complex picture in schools.
We had become used to a certainty of sorts – government mandates (however sketchy and last-minute) – which determined our responses. But now it was all about ‘local decision making’. About ‘Personal responsibility’.
Because, like all school leaders, I was feeling that ‘personal responsibility’ had been missing from my life these last 18 months…
Before Delta appeared, we had planned for Term 6, a second whole-school focus called ‘Blackhorse Festival’, designed to promote a sense of belonging by studying the local area: its history, geography and culture. This was to culminate in a music and arts festival on the school field in July.
But before we even got to that, questions were now being asked about the Sports Days and other in-person events we’d planned for June.
You see, the leadership team and I had come to the conclusion that the dislocation between families and the school was becoming more of a risk to children’s well-being than the pandemic itself. We felt that, if it came down to a finely balanced judgement, so long as the risks were managed, events should go ahead.
We held the Sports day with socially distanced parent spectators. I had dozens of emails from parents thanking us for taking this balanced risk – and one from a parent accusing me of reckless disregard for her child’s health, and promising to ‘go to the papers’ if her child got COVID.
He didn’t.
Everywhere schools were cancelling events and retreating back into their COVID bunkers. Whilst entirely understandable, we didn’t feel this was right for us. But it left us feeling exposed.
Towards the end of the month, I ran my second training event of the running season: The Cheddar Marathon. It was again the hottest day of the year so far, and with (another) 4000ft of climbing. Half of the 300 or so starting runners failed to finish. However, this time I did – albeit in 5 hours. Whilst pleased I hadn’t again passed out, something didn’t feel right. It hurt more than it should have done and I walked with a visible limp for the rest of the month.
July 2021 Scare away the dark – Passenger: Balancing the risks.
By July, ‘Freedom Day’ was looking less like the joyful throwing open of the doors and more a gamble designed to pacify an increasingly restless nation.
In school we were all exhausted. The easy decision would have been to cancel everything and coast towards the summer holidays, especially as bubbles started to pop around the school and more and more staff caught COVID.
Our community had been battered by the pandemic (as everyone’s had). More than once I asked my SLT whether they thought my decisions to push on with Y6 Camp, with trips, with our end of year festival, were reckless. But the view of both the SLT and staff was that these things needed to happen.
So our children went off to PGL camp and went wild as they, all 60 in a room, watched as England won the Euro 2020/1 Semi-final: a moment of collective joy which will stay with them forever.
From camp I drove straight to the Isle of Wight for the Half Island Ultra (I’d downgraded my entry from the full 117k race). I hobbled round and finished near the back completely broken – a race which I’d won six years earlier. I just didn’t have it in me. The months of pandemic-led micro stress had had physically depleted me to the point where routine race distances seems nearly impossible.
As we crawled to the last week of the school year, harried by COVID, we were left to decide what to do about the Blackhorse Festival – the centre piece of Term 6’s focus on grounding children in their community and fostering interconnection. Again, the easy thing would have been to have cancelled – god knows, we could all have done with one less thing to worry about.
It was one of the hottest and most gloriously sunny days of the year. Spread across the whole site, the event felt safe and brought the whole community back together after 18 months apart. The children performed songs and plays charting the history of our community. Our musicians performed for the first time since March 2020.
We, again, received dozens of emails from parents saying that it is what they needed to feel part of their community once again.
On the very last day of term, we held a cross-country competition for the local schools. Again, tired as we were, we could have cancelled. However, our Y6 runners hadn’t had the opportunity to represent their school and desperately wanted the chance to leave their mark as so many had done before.
As a school which espouses the virtue of ‘Expensive Opportunities’ it was the right thing to do.
August 2021: Dog Gone – Frank Black
For the first two weeks of the summer holidays I felt utterly exhausted. Much like 12 months earlier, I felt the weight of the past twelve months – but without the blind optimism that it was all over.
Over the holidays I read Adam Buxton’s biography, detailing (amongst other things) how he ended up directing a video for Pixies front man, Frank Black.
The song ‘Dog Gone’ was the first-person story of an asteroid heading to Earth, as a blissfully unaware humanity went about its mundane business. It seemed a good metaphor for the previous 20 months – a world which had no way of knowing the calamity which was about to befall it.
Although exhausted, I was also very frustrated that I’d not been able to run the distances which I’d become used to and, against my better judgement, decided to try to finish the season off with the 46 mile Green Man Ultra, earning both the summer medal and the coveted ‘double’ belt buckle (long story).
Holidaying again on the Isle of Wight, I decided that if I could do two fifty mile training weeks, with two 20 mile back-to-back hilly long runs in each, then I’d just about be fit enough to race at the end of the month.
No sooner had I signed up and finished my first week and a half of high mileage training, then a sharp, stabbing pain appeared in my left hip. I’d had trouble with it on and off all summer, but put it down to overtraining and exhaustion.
For the rest of the month I battled with stretching and even went to yoga with my daughter in a bid to sort out this ‘IT band issue’ in time for the race.
By race day I had done a fraction of the training needed. But, having run the race half a dozen times before (including without support the previous year during lockdown) I figured I’d give it a go and see where I ended up – setting various race goals starting with ‘don’t end up it hospital’; and with the most ambitious being ‘finish’.
I set off much slower than previously, with the 11 hour pacing group (having run much of it with the 9 hour group 18 months earlier).
I was fine until Dundry Hill, a section of the course which climbs nearly continuously for five miles from mile 37 onwards, over uneven paths, at which point I fell off the back of the pacing group and slowed to a walk.
At the last aid station at 40 miles, I started to feel odd again and worried that I was about to pass out. I just about had enough time to finish before the 12 hour cut off (after which you’d be disqualified) but not if I got stopped on medical grounds. Fortunately, a kind Marshall gave me a cup of tea, and didn’t notice that I was swaying. This perked me up enough to keep upright and carry on.
I’d also been joined by a pacing squad of my own, in the form of two great mates: Phil Winterburn (HT at Wheatfield) and James Almond (DHT at May Park). Jim even brought a wireless speaker for a mobile disco, which may have gotten odd looks from other struggling runners, but proved a lifesaver.
A struggled across the finish line in 11hrs 40 minutes. By far the slowest I’d ever run the race. Yet, after nearly 30 marathons and 20 Ultras, with my mates at my side, this will always be one of my favourites.
You never feel great after an Ultra, but having got home, sat shaking uncontrollably – then vomiting, I knew I’d pushed my body to a point which was ‘ill-advised’.
But I had my buckle.
The pain in my hip was now constant, but I was desperate to have a better running year in 2022, so I hired a specialist Ultra coach as my birthday present. He gave me a plan to return to full fitness.
I was blissfully unaware of the damage which was already done.
“And the news is going to break – now I am here”.
September: Oasis – Whatever: Life begins again.
September marked a return to complete normality for the school.
Bubbles, face masks, mass isolation – all went at the stroke of a pen.
Whilst it would have been easy to fret about the possible direction of the pandemic, we wrote a simple contingency plan and then got on with the business of school improvement.
The plan from the outset was to keep the SDP small and tight (something we might not have achieved). We settled on three main areas, around a central theme of ‘Growing Champions’ (a call back to the work we’d done in the summer).
Again, improving the quality of classroom teaching was at the SDPs core, not because the teacher was weak (it wasn’t) but because a ‘higher learning strike rate’ was the key to catching the children up.
We also wanted to focus on the quality of our wider curriculum, which we’d introduced during the first lockdown but hadn’t had the opportunity to refine and embed.
Thirdly, we wanted to improve children’s resilience and grit, which we’d seen decline significantly over the course of the past two years (which I wrote about here).
September got off to a cracking start, with the staff rising to the challenge.
We could have done without the distraction of appearing first in the Bristol Post… then the Sun, Mail, Mirror, Star, Times, Express… and The Paris Gazette (!?), over a ridiculous storm in a tea cup. Parents rallied to the school’s side to show their support and it did us no reputational harm. However, when we started getting death threats from trolls emailing the school, it became more annoying.
But the biggest event of the month was my daughter heading off to the University of Manchester and my son to Sixth Form. Both had the worst of it during the last 18 months, so seeing them get on with their lives was wonderful.
As Erin was off to Manchester, I made a playlist of suitable Manc Brit pop to make the journey to her new life a bit more fun (and less sad for Julie and I). As we got to the edge of the city, Erin became unusually quiet. To use her (slightly sweary) lingo ‘this shit just got real’. However, when ‘Whatever’ came on the playlist just as the signs welcoming freshers appeared by the roadside, there was a feeling life was (finally) about to start.
I also had a session with a Private Physio, as my hip still wasn’t right and I wanted some stretches to make it better…
Physio: Could you just walk around the room a bit.
Me: Sure – I think it’s my IT band – perhaps some stretches would help?
Physio: Maybe. Although your walk looks unusual. I’d like you to get an X-ray.
Me: Okay – stress fracture? I did hammer it a bit on the last Ultra.
Physio: Maybe – get an x-ray…
October: REM – Walk it back: Reality bites.
As a school, we’d actively sort out external evaluation as the new school year began. We knew that the previous 18 months had knocked us off course so wanted to ‘stress test’ everything to look for weak spots.
In a single fortnight in October, we had an external Maths review and an externally (OFSTED Inspector) led Science Deep Dive. Both showed we had a lot to do to get back on track.
In Maths, our teaching had become ‘baggy’ (the only word I think describes it best). For five years we’d ridden the wave of high attainment so hadn’t returned to the (then winning) formula. But the review exposed inconsistencies in planning and teaching which, if left unchecked, would lead to underachievement down the road.
In science, our curriculum design , whilst engaging and motivating, wasn’t focusing enough on the core substance of the science curriculum. Again, this was straightforward to rectify, but would eat into the time we’d set aside for other things.
As always, the staff responded magnificently, energetically looking at ways to make the necessary improvements.
Then, on some idle Tuesday morning, ‘that’ text popped up on my phone.
I rang the doctor and waited two weeks for a telephone appointment.
Doctor: Hi Simon. Right, what we talking about again?
Me: My hip x-ray. It says there’s ‘significant arthritis’?
Doctor: [pause whilst reading screen]. Yeah – wow [chuckle to self] your left hip is completely gone… the right one isn’t looking great either. Yeah – you must be in a LOT of pain… I don’t usually see them this bad!
Me: Okay, wow – that’s really upsetting. I’m a really keen runner.
Doctor: [laughs] Well that’s over! I’m amazed you can walk! I like to run myself – I smashed my triathlon times this year…!
I spent the rest of the month in the first four stages of mourning: denial, anger, bargaining and depression.
I know a lot of people receive far worse news than mine, and I am eternally grateful for the good health I do have; for a great job and a wonderful wife and family.
But when the rhythm of every week, every month, every year contains the structure of running; when the answer to any stressful situation is to ‘go for a run’; when you’re known as that Headteacher who runs crazy distances.
News that it’s all gone in the time it took for a 5 minute phone call was a bitter pill to swallow.
November 2021: Lottery Winners – Start again.
In early November I paid to see a hip specialist – who happened to have treated a number of the British Triathlon Team for hip problems and therefore I assumed would have a plan.
He explained that, mainly as a result of genetics and some mystery injury I sustained as a child (falling out of a tree or suchlike), and then compounded by 19 years of running upwards of 50 miles a week, I had no protective cartilage in my left hip and about 5-10 years worth left in my right. He put it more kindly than my GP, but the prognosis was the same – my right hip was completely shot and needed replacing, which at 47, is unlucky.
So I bought a bike.
If I can’t be an Ultra Runner, then I’ll learn to be an ultra cyclist.
The day after I brought the bike home I came down with COVID.
December 2021: PWEI – Bulletproof.
As 2021 drew to an end, we (as a school) stuck to the plan and held 8 live performances for YR, KS1, Y3-4 & Y5-6. The PTA and staff held an outdoor ‘Window Wonderland and Christmas market’ – in the pouring rain (which raised £2500).
Again, I can only comment on what felt right for our school at that moment in time. Many schools were grappling with far more serious COVID issues than we were.
Christmas happened as usual (albeit with Covid passports, LFTs etc).
And for the first time in two years, I got to do the ‘dance of the mad’ with two lovely Grebos who I’ve known since I was 12 (see above). Both have experienced more hardship than I have this year.
And as a school leader I finished the year knowing that, after everything that had happened, we had rendered ourselves bulletproof!
January 2022: Much Better
* I know this is two Lottery Winners picks, but they do seem to have tapped into the 2021 Zeitgeist!
And so, dear reader, we arrive at the start of 2022.
Let’s face it, the last two years haven’t been… well… a bit crap.
In the last two years, we have all suffered some privation; a few have suffered more greatly.
But I start 2022 with an abundance of hope.
Despite all that has gone before, I think our schools are as capable and strong as at any point in my 26 year career.
I think our teachers, and our support staff, are as creative as at any point in the last decade.
I think that, despite some massive staffing headaches which Omicron will put our way, the next year looks infinitely better than the last two.
What happens next is up to us.
And I have a bike.
southgloshead 
Just brilliant, Simon – as ever. Thanks for sharing something so personal and so difficult. I’ve never been a runner, so it’s not easy for me to understand how central that has been to your life, but a few years ago I was diagnosed with osteoarthritis in both knees (more likely exacerbated by the ridiculous heels I wore between the 1970s and the 2000s than anything healthily exercise related…) and am navigating that now – moderate exercise, heat treatments (exercises in the jacuzzi and regular saunas help when I can’t soak up the sun), ibuprofen gel and tubigrip bandages are helping for now, but I think injections and surgery may lie ahead. My husband used to run, and now swims, and that really helps his physical and mental health.
Enjoy the cycling (and maybe swimming?), be kind to your body, and very best wishes for the year ahead.
LikeLike