Good morning beautiful blog-readers! For many of us, the great and mighty Covid has caused us all to take a step back and look at what we’ve been doing with our lives. For some of us, Covid has even forced us to take a long, hard look at whether or not it’s time to change things up a bit.

In my situation, I was both blessed and tortured. Blessed in the sense that in 18 months or so of lockdown, I found myself doing the one thing that I’ve wanted to do for about 40 years. WRITE. Tortured in the sense that all the training I’d been doing in my quest to win Gold at the World Masters Squash Championships was basically put on the shelf. And right now, it’s a really high shelf that I can’t reach without a bloody step-stool. It’s much easier to reach the things on the lower shelves, like bread, and potatoes, and crisps, and prosecco, and ice-cream, and all the comfort foods I had denied myself during 2019 leading up to my win at the European Championships.

My former toned and sweat-drenched body with a resting heart-rate of 50, has blossomed into a portly, shiny and cheerful pudge-fest with resting heart-rate of 75. Last week, I questioned the difference between these two strange phenoms and dared myself to merge them together. I miss being fit and strong. There’s no reason why I can’t be an athlete AND a writer, I told myself. (I talk to myself a lot).

I compared the discipline of my squash training with the discipline of my new found love, Writing. Both have similarities and yet also one extreme. Both require routine and structure on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. But the big difference between my desire to win Gold in Poland a year ago, and my dream of being a writer, is simply very black and white. Winning Gold means not losing. Yet every day that I write, I feel like a winner. There isn’t really any losing in writing. One writes what they see, hear, feel, discover, touch, breath in, or taste, and they write with passion and conviction. For that, we are winners.

In an attempt to remind myself of who I am (especially after a bucket-load of Prosecco on a Saturday night, after Mayo lost to Tyrone. Not saying WHO I was supporting. I drink Prosecco as a baby drinks Mothers Milk), I was delighted to read through this interview I did with the Shona Project* recently.

It’s a gentle reminder of the life I have led and continue to lead. It’s a soft wake-up call of years gone by and dreams ahead. It’s a positive reinforcement of who I am, that I’ve embraced it all, and that we are all on a path of continued self-discovery, regardless of the number of wrinkles we see or rolls of fat we carry. It’s so easy to get lost in the day-to-day stuff, and stagger onto a different path, forgetting what it is that really keeps us going. But if I keep writing here, you won’t read the interview! So, it’s a short blog today. I have so much more to do to finish my auto-biography but with my new 2.0 readers, I can see the finish-line ahead.

This is me in a nutshell. Enjoy the read and have a very happy Monday! https://shona.ie/orla-odoherty/

*Read all about the wonderful work they do here : https://shona.ie/