Billy

Trigger warning: this post discusses depression and suicide. There are links and resources at the end, or near the end of this page, if you don't want to read on.

When I moved to Ireland I joined a fitness group. I had asked around and discovered that the friend of a friend who was the national boxing and world kickboxing champion trained at Jimmy Payne’s circuits group on Tuesdays and Fridays. After quashing my mild alarm at Jimmy's homophonous surname, I went down to the Waterpark sports hall on the Newtown Road. Jimmy had us all circle the room, now running slowly, now doing high-knees, now butt-kicks, now hamstring kicks, now arms a-windmilling, now swinging side-steps. It lasted for about fifteen minutes, and I was exhausted after five. We lined up at one end and sprinted hard down to the other, jogged back, and repeated over and over, whilst Jimmy’s keen eye ensured that the sprint was nothing less than at stomach-churning pace. At last he shouted, “That’s the warm-up done, lads, now onto the real work!”

He wasn’t joking. Over the next few weeks I came to learn that the Waterpark warm-ups were unlike any other form of exercise I’d encountered. Only after I was sweating on wobbly legs came the actual training involving nearly two hours of extremely physically-demanding workouts, during which Jimmy showed us why and how he had been the Irish national boxing coach and won four national titles himself.

On that first evening the session included plank-walking sideways across the hall and back, again and again. I couldn’t even hold a plank, never mind crabwalk with it. I looked across at tough little Lynne the kickboxer and the others, all intimidatingly fierce and unknown, their bodies as flat as a board and scuttling around the room like some grotesque synchronised circus, while I was pronking around with my arse in the air like Mowgli in the elephant parade. At the end Jimmy said to me with a twinkle in his eye and a challenge in his voice, “If you can manage to come to three sessions, you’ll stay”. I stayed for nearly six years.

Throughout my time in Ireland, Jimmy’s circuits and the friends I met there were the only constants in my life. I lived in Waterford, the sunny south-east, from the 14th September 2008 to the 23rd May 2014 - the dates are engraved on my memory - and in that time I moved house seven times, had two different cars and jobs, either ended or started three long-distance, long-term relationships, and suffered - and survived - suicidal depression.

That first circuits class took place in the summer, and within a few weeks, we had decided to train together for the October 2009 Dublin marathon. Jimmy, an experienced marathon runner, designed and led us through a programme, which included the twice-weekly two-hour circuits, mid-week runs on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and the weekend long run. Apart from three runners, it was the first marathon for all of us, and Jimmy made sure we ran at a slow and steady 10 minute mile pace.

What happened in my marathon training marks the very start of my blog, and I have written about all my marathons in depth since 2010. What I didn’t add was that after Paris 2010, my first “international” marathon - (although I was from the UK and therefore all my races thus far had been “overseas", I had been accepted as a Déise girl - even if they didn’t like to admit it to my face - by Jimmy and my other friends whom I had thought were so intimidating and fearsome on that first evening) - after Paris, Jimmy sent me a text which I received as I was sitting down to my post-race dinner. I have changed phones since then, but I always remembered the content, even if the words are not exact: “Well done in Paris, great finish time. I remember when you first started with me and you couldn’t even do a press-up. Now look at you, you’re an international athlete."

The years and the marathons passed, and we all followed Jimmy from Waterpark to his new premises in Cleaboy, now on Mondays and Wednesdays, with a “light" one-hour session on Fridays. Jimmy’s new place was first in one business park and then down the road in the other, where Peak Fitness was born and thrivingly continues.

One of his favourite activities was to have us take a 5kg or 6kg medicine ball, and run fast from the Waterpark up the Newtown Road to Benildus Church, and later in Cleaboy, up to the roundabout. We never knew whether we’d have to do it once, twice, or sometimes even three times, but he wouldn't let us slow down to save energy for a potential double run. He could tell from the time it took us whether we were pushing ourselves, and only when the first runner got back to base would he tell them to run a second time. That moment when the leader re-appeared at the bottom of the hill, telling us we’d have to do another lap, was gut-wrenching. In Cleaboy, to my dismay, he bought fifteen spin bikes and we’d do a hard session before toppling off the bike on shaky legs to do the inevitable ball run up to the roundabout and back.

In that first golden Waterpark summer we’d sometimes run awkwardly backwards four times round the hurling pitch. Each lap was 400m, a mile in total, and Jimmy would time each lap. But we ran with the medicine balls up to Benildus and, later to the Cleaboy roundabout, all year round. I can recall with exact, painful clarity, running with our heavy weights, legs shaking from the quad and ham reps we’d already done, gasping with sweat in the hot summer evenings, faces red and stung with sharp November rain, and slipping on sparkling frost in the dark nights of winter.

If we were pushed hard, it wasn’t always because of Jimmy. Billy Kelly, a John’s Park man who had worked in the glass factory and on the doors of Ruby’s, Mason’s, and Shortt’s, would keep a close eye on his fellow trainees, and mock us all to the top level of fitness. “If ye have to do press-ups on your knees, lads, there’s no shame in it”, he’d goad. “No shame at all. Of course I’ll be doing the real ones.” There were markedly fewer knee press-ups while Billy was in session. In Cleaboy, Billy would be there before any of us, having just completed an hour’s boxing class before joining us for the two hour circuits. If there were twelve of us, we’d do 120 reps, if fifteen, we’d do 150 reps each of press-ups, lunges, exploding squats, burpees, and the like, each person counting to ten aloud one after the other until everyone had counted. If anyone spoke too quietly from the effort of exertion, we’d all bellow, “Can’t hear ya, SPEAK UP PLEASE!". Jimmy would threaten - and keep his word - that if anyone slacked during the reps, we’d have to start from scratch. If anyone missed a rep or bodged it, Billy would be the first one to call them out, and we’d all start from the first rep again, even if we’d already done eighty. Jimmy would sit reclining on the side, occasionally yawning loudly and saying, “Jaysus, lads, I’m tired!”. There was a lot of ribbing, most of it from Jimmy, much of it from Billy, but the others gave as good as they got. We’d all run our first marathon together and that kind of bond stays a long time.

In 2013 I was super fit, but thinner and unhappier than I had ever been. I had descended into depression, and in October I was signed off work for two weeks by my doctor on the grounds of work-related stress, anxiety and severe depression. On the final Sunday before I was due back to work, I had driven up to Dublin by way of Glendalough to meet my cousin, her husband, and their little one-and-a-half year old, Elsie, who were over for the weekend. On the way out of Dublin afterwards with the weight of returning to work hanging over me, I took a wrong turn, missed the way to the motorway, and found myself driving around Rathmines lost in a panic attack with tears streaming down my face, shaking, and gasping for air. I hoped that someone, somehow, would stop me and call the police or emergency services and intervene - I was unable to intervene in myself - but instead I found the motorway and drove fast, far too fast, willing myself to turn the wheel violently and flip the car. Then I thought of little Elsie and how she was just at the height where the corners of chairs jump out and give you a bang on the head. She had bumped her golden curls on a sharp corner and sobbed with indignant pain. I reflected that the hurt had been literally one of the worst things that had ever happened to her, and I didn’t want to be the one to change that. I got myself home.

After I arrived back at my house in Waterford, I had a late Sunday night phone call from my boss. I answered, because I always answered - in any case, if I didn’t pick up, he’d only ring again. It was not unknown for myself and my colleagues to return to our phones to find five or more missed calls flashing up on the screen. He said hopefully, not without kindness in his voice, but without empathy, “I trust you’ve recovered. I expect you to hit the ground running tomorrow and be back working at 100%.” I still wonder what I would have done had he called before I had got in the car in Dublin.

I was still running and attending circuits, and my fitness was at a long peak. But I felt worse inside, and in February 2014 my boss called me into his office and said that he had been talking to HR, and that they all thought I needed to take a long time off work. He suggested three months. He had clearly been talking to people and learning about depression, as his understanding and empathy was much greater than it had been in October. My doctor agreed, and so it was that I found myself on an unexpected plane to Bangkok and onwards to Cambodia, and as I stood contemplatively at the back of the great temple of Angkor Wat having walked through kilometres of corridors intricately carved almost one thousand years before, and out into the dry, scented jungle, I knew at that sunlit moment that I wanted to live. I had made Waterford my home because I loved Ireland, but I had stayed too long and it had almost killed me. I understood what I had to do.

Angkor Wat by G Mason

Two years later I am settled in London - my city, my home - with a kind, supporting job that I had succeeding in securing with my experience gained from slogging through those six hard years. I am living with the same boyfriend with whom I had started something special in those final draining months in Waterford, and I have friends around me. I am more financially comfortable than I have ever been, despite living in one of the most expensive cities in the world. And I have more annual leave than I know what to do with. I suffered from Imposter Syndrome for many years and although I have all of this because I worked hard, I worked my arse off for it, it’s still sometimes difficult for me to comprehend that I actually deserve it.

On the last day of April this year my phone rang at 2am on a Saturday night. It was my running buddy Daw. “Billy Kelly’s dead”, he said. “He hanged himself last night”.

I sat in the kitchen and cried, with Daw so far away on the other end of the phone. "I’ll come over", I said at once. "I’ll come to his funeral. You just let me know when it is and I’ll be right over”.

It was on the Tuesday, three days later. I didn’t go. It happens so quickly in Ireland. But I could have gone; there were flights, my boss would have understood that I needed time off, I had the money. I don’t know why I didn’t go. I suppose I was thinking of what it would be like inside the church, and the stifling sermon. “Passed away”, they’d say. “Entered eternal rest”. I couldn’t bear it if they said, “He lost his battle with depression”. As if it was a fight, just a boxing match and he was back on the bags in the gym, and if he’d tried harder - made more of an effort, dammit - he wouldn’t have lost.

I remember saying fiercely to a friend years ago, if I ever kill myself, I want them to say the word. Say it out loud and don’t hide it. [edit August 2023: this is no longer my viewpoint. Stay]. I suppose I was still wondering if it could have helped him, had I spoken about my depression when I’d been there. Mental illness and suicide is not often or comfortably talked about in Ireland. I remembered my Waterford boss saying, long before I became depressed, that suicide is an evil, selfish deed. That is the kind of thing that is said in everyday conversation and accepted as fact, and so of course it’s hard to talk. With the oppressive weight of Church-and-State hanging over the country like a rotten, unbreakable marriage, even I didn’t talk about it publicly until I'd left and I was safe in the bright openness of London where I could breathe. Yet I’d said it to a small number of Waterford friends before I went on sick leave to let them know where I was going and the reaction was unanimously supportive and empathic: “Oh, I had a friend or a brother who’d gone through that. I understand how tough it is for you.” And Jimmy, who knew more than most, had said, “That’s what the circuits and the running are for. Helps with the head”. They had been the only thing keeping me sane for six years. “I’ll be back”, I said to him before I left, “I’ll come back for a circuits session to see you all”. “No, you won’t”, he replied. And I guess he was right.

We didn’t know how Billy was feeling. None of us knew. He must have felt so deeply alone and desperate, and intolerably so on that night; his last. That’s what depression does to you; it isolates you and makes you forget you have people around you who care. But you need a safe, normalised place to talk and to reach out, for both parties - it’s hard to talk for the person suffering and for those around them. How could Billy have felt safe to ask for help when it’s not a thing widely spoken of?

I don’t run now, but I still go to circuits. It’s not the same as Jimmy’s, of course, but I have another circle of gym buddies - my friends - here in London. But Billy is still here at all my classes, inside my head: “If you have to do press-ups on your knees, there’s no shame in it, none at all. Of course I’ll be doing the real ones.”

Me and Billy

This post was published on World Mental Health Day 2016, in memory of Billy.

Dublin marathon October 2009

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. For more information visit www.samaritans.org. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org

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