Jamie Laing has admitted that he’s still not feeling brilliant as he recovers from running five ultramarathons to raise money for Comic Relief.
The 36-year-old has revealed he’s still recovering physically and mentally from the massive undertaking, which saw him pushed to his psychological and biological limits.
Speaking on his podcast ‘Great Company with Jamie Laing’, where he was the interviewee rather than the interviewer, the BBC Radio 1 presenter said he was still feeling the effects.
He explained: “Since then I haven’t felt great, if I’m totally honest. I haven’t been that great. I couldn’t switch off and I think that what’s probably happens.
“I think that when you put your body through something pretty traumatic like that, it’s pretty hard to switch off. …Feet are sore but they’re ok. I played some tennis this morning, I can’t really move still.”
Jamie has also opened up about the mental impact of the run and how it forced him to think a lot about his life. What’s more, he said it gave him a better understanding as to why people do these challenges and why they can be so life changing.
He said: “For me personally, it was quite a lot. This is why people do these challenges, I think, because all those things in your life that you’ve, like, doubted yourself, or you’ve maybe, like, not thought you can do it, or lost confidence, or whatever it is, or people have shut you down, or whatever it is. Suddenly I was like, ‘No, I’ve done it’ and it was this huge release.”
This isn’t the first time Jamie has talked about his health battles. In recent months he has opened up about living with both tinnitus and anxiety. Tinnitus is an incurable hearing condition whereby someone hears a permanent ringing or rushing in their ears all the time.
Discussing the condition on This Morning earlier this year, he said: “It is pretty debilitating. My story is that nine years ago, I woke up one morning and could hear this ringing.
“I searched the whole house to find this noise. Then I realised it was in my head, which is quite a scary thing. Really frightening, and the upsetting thing is that it affects one in seven people.
“The hard thing about it is no one can see it or feel it. So, it’s a very solo problem. You’re very stuck in your own body with it.
“People with tinnitus are so scared of it, so scared it’s there the whole time. But now, I treat it as that really annoying friend.
“If it’s really loud, I go, ‘Ok, what are you trying to tell me?’ I’m either anxious. I’m either stressed, I’m either overworked or overtired. If you do that with it, it kind of helps it a little bit.”
Returning to the impact of the run on his body, Jamie has also said that he was in “too much pain” during the challenge to hear the support coming from the crowd.
In an interview with The Times, he said that part of this was psychological, and that the pain he felt before the run was, in large part, to do with his anxiety.
He told the publication that before he was diagnosed with anxiety, he was afraid he would lose his job: “I was meant to be this outgoing, confident individual, and inside I was crippled with this …I didn’t even know what it was. I went to a doctor and said, ‘Something’s wrong with me. I don’t know what’s going on.’”
Since being diagnosed with anxiety, Jamie has been open about living with it, and this in turn has inspired men around the UK to talk about their feelings and their fears, something magnified by his completion of the ultramarathon.
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