Thankfully, I have never been ashamed of my towering six foot frame or its athletic build, but that does not mean that I have remained steadfastly untouched by the global expectation that a small elegant body is the goal for all women. Many stretches of my life were spent eating and training with the objective of getting and maintaining a slim litheness. As an equestrian I needed to be extremely strong and agile. It is a ruthlessly demanding sport that requires a mental and physical aptitude for commitment and determination. My relationships to long distance running became a way of regulating my inner world, coping with the many demands of riding and of maintaining some essential thread between my developing body and mind that didn't involve a half-tonne horse. It has been my companion since childhood. My reset button, a sacred space. Running sharpens me while calming me simultaneously, a form of therapy in motion, a private dialogue carried out over distance and breath.

But not every version of my relationship to it has been healthy. There were periods where I used running as a way of exerting impossible expectations over myself, testing my limits unnecessarily, trying to discipline my body to perform in ways that did not serve it at all. I was always a strong runner, but I never allowed myself to become truly powerful because I didn't fuel enough to train seriously. I was scared of bulking, even when strength should have been my priority. Looking back, I can see how misguided I was and how much I withheld from myself.

Les Hirondelles, the artist's retreat I am building from an abandoned longère in the middle of Le Perche, changed that relationship entirely.

The moment I understood the scale of what the renovation would ask of me, physically and mentally, I realised I could no longer afford to treat my body as something decorative. This house demanded endurance. It demanded strength, resilience, adaptability, stamina and clarity. It required me to become capable rather than merely controlled.  I needed to be able to work harder than ever, without injury and without pain. 

For the first time in my life, I began eating and training not to become smaller, but to become able. Able to lift stone and timber.  Able to work twelve hour days alone between Paris and Normandy. I became able to continue through exhaustion, cold, uncertainty and isolation. And through all of it, I kept running. Not to disappear from myself, but to return more fully into my body each time. My relationship to running has come to reflect the complexity of a body constantly adapting, enduring and transforming. 

Before I took on the renovation, my running habits had begun to change for the worse. No matter how much I ran, periods of stress started to settle into my body in a way movement alone could no longer dissolve. Moving to a new country often made me feel as though I had never truly understood anything before. The language, the systems, the isolation of holding an entire vision alone. It felt, at times, as though the wind had been completely knocked from my sails. Sometimes it still does. I would offset all this uncertainty with longer and longer runs.

Despite this, the periods of anxiety became longer and all consuming, even while I desperately tried to maintain and push the running rituals that once kept me stable.

My runs, once a source of clarity and consistency, began offering diminishing returns against the spiralling weight of work and responsibility. Slowly, I realised something I had never allowed myself to before: Perhaps the best run I can give myself is no run at all. I can accept that rest itself is productive and that resting allows me to run faster and further than when I was pushing myself to run everyday.

Sometimes it seemed like the house itself actively resisted being saved. It was impossible to have more than one light on at a time. Running the shower would somehow trip the entire electrical system. One winter, a snowstorm took out all the power entirely and the house became uninhabitable during the coldest stretch of December. Some days I could barely make it through the work itself, let alone lace up my shoes afterwards and head out into the dark to run fifteen kilometres.

And yet it was during this period, with longer stretches passing between runs, that something inside me finally shifted. I realised that punishing myself for not running was the worst thing I could possibly do. My body was already working beyond anything I had ever asked of it before. I needed it for other things now.

My figure was changing in response to real physical labour, and part of me feared it would become unfamiliar to me.

But instead, each new muscle felt like a form of protection slowly gathering around me. Strength settled into my body quietly, not as hardness, but as reassurance.

My shoulders broadened from carrying timber and stone, my legs steadied themselves against uneven ground, my hands toughened and learned the shape of work.

Rather than losing myself, I began to feel more deeply held by my own body.  It carried me through exhaustion, through cold mornings and collapsing walls, through every beam lifted and every impossible task completed alone. The muscle I built here did not distance me from femininity or softness, it rooted me more firmly inside myself. The moment I let go of the quiet ideal I had carried for so many years about how a woman’s body should look and move, I discovered something far more satisfying than thinness. I discovered capability. Now I understand that my responsibility is to carry my body through this process with as much care and intelligence as I can.

The renovation demanded so much physicality from me that, by the end of the day, I often felt a deep current of satiation that only comes with complete exhaustion. Sometimes I still ran, but the runs themselves had changed too. They were no longer about pace, punishment or proving anything. I would run simply to see the countryside at dusk, to watch the seasons changing across the fields, to pick up honey from a neighbouring farm, or to catch the sunset from the top of a hill after a day spent indoors covered in lime and dust.

The work at Les Hirondelles has tied me physically to the house itself. As the house changes, so do I. My body is no longer something decorative that exists to be looked at. It has become the vessel through which this place can slowly come back to life. I need to lift whatever stands in my way and trust myself to do it. There is an enormous freedom in that.

Exercise is no longer about shrinking myself. It is about supporting the life I want to live. Runs sometimes get shortened so I can squeeze in some weight training because I know my back will need protecting through weeks of lifting. It means not running fasted anymore and eating enough calories to sustain sixteen hour work days. I treat my body like a machine and not like a doll. A machine worthy of maintenance rather than an object to be disciplined into submission.

And strangely, it has also softened me. Self care can now include stopping work halfway through the day when the rain becomes too heavy, abandoning the to-do list for an evening beside the fire with my partner and our dog. When I reach the end of a brutal stretch of work at the house and stand back to look at something I once believed impossible now finished by my own hands, I feel a pride so overwhelming it almost brings me to tears. The only thing I can compare it to is the surge of pride you feel when crossing the finish line of a marathon. An all consuming pride that sweeps over you because somehow, despite exhaustion and doubt, I did not stop.

With every wall repaired, every beam lifted and every room brought slowly back into the light, I find myself becoming more connected to both my body and my mind than I have ever been before. And just like my relationship with this house, my relationship with running continues to evolve. The balance is forever shifting. Now functionality, feeling, pleasure and strength have begun to matter just a little more than perfection.