The years I spent in hospital corridors
There was a time when my days were measured not in miles, but in the journeys between hospital, office and home. I worked through the day, visited my parents in the evening, kept track of test results and medication, listened carefully to doctors, and tried to reassure the family that everything was still under control.
The exhaustion of those years went far beyond ordinary tiredness. Physical tiredness can usually be eased by a good night's sleep or a few quiet days. This was something else. I would wake each morning feeling as though I had recharged to thirty per cent, while the day ahead asked for a hundred and twenty. By bedtime, it was no longer a matter of feeling tired. I felt slowly, steadily depleted.
In the final years of my parents' lives, I came to understand something with great clarity: a long life is not the same as a life lived well. When life is prolonged through repeated hospital admissions, through pain and helplessness, the strain falls not only on the person who is unwell, but on everyone around them. What stayed with me most was not my own fear. It was watching how exhausted and heartbroken the family had become — especially the younger generation.
One evening, sitting alone in a hospital corridor, I made a quiet promise to myself. If the day comes when I am old and unwell, I do not want my children to carry that same helplessness.
From that moment, health began to mean something different. It was no longer about how fast I could run, how far I could go, or how many races I might finish. It became a question of whether I could look after myself well enough to lighten the load on the people I love. Running, movement, daily care — these were no longer only for me. They became part of a responsibility I felt towards my family: not to pass the same pain and exhaustion on to the next generation.
Many people know me as a marathon runner. But before I am a runner, I am a son, a husband and a father, and those roles have shaped how I understand recovery. As a carer, I know what it is to feel there is simply no time to rest. As a runner, I know that without proper recovery, even the most disciplined training plan will, in the end, do more harm than good.
The older I become, the more I notice that our generation has grown very good at doing a little more — and rather less practised at knowing how to recover.
Why I want to begin with recovery
You may be reading this while carrying responsibilities of your own. Perhaps you belong to the sandwich generation, supporting ageing parents while your children still need you. And perhaps, at the same time, your own body is changing. Sleep, hormones, skin and mood may no longer behave as they once did.
It is not that you fail to understand the importance of health. More often, you have already spent most of your energy looking after everyone else. When it comes to your own needs, the thought is usually the same:
I'll deal with it when things calm down.
But life rarely offers a moment when everything becomes calm. Instead, we are surrounded by messages telling us to do more: exercise more, follow a longer routine, book another treatment, try another method, be more disciplined. When body and mind are already tired, one more thing to do quickly becomes one more source of pressure.
So, as a runner — and as a son who spent years walking hospital corridors — I would rather begin by talking about recovery than by asking you to do more.
For a long time, I believed that more effort was the answer. More training. More discipline. A stricter routine. There was a first marathon, then a second, then a third. I ran in Hong Kong, in Japan, in London and beyond. I enjoyed the challenge, the feeling at the finish line, the reassurance that my body could still do it.
Then, during one training cycle, something changed. I was not injured, but I was persistently tired. Even after eight hours of sleep, I woke unrefreshed. Running stopped giving me energy; it became another task to complete. I grew short with my family. My concentration at work suffered. Small things began to feel heavier than they should.
An experienced coach looked through my training log and asked me a simple question.
"Are you resting?"
I told him I took one day off running each week. He paused, then said:
"I didn't ask whether you stop training. I asked whether you recover."
That was the first time I understood that rest and recovery are not the same thing. On the days I did not run, I was still answering emails, arranging meetings, managing the household, planning the week ahead. My legs had stopped; my nervous system had not.
Something else my coach said has stayed with me ever since:
"If you want to run further, you first have to learn how to stop well."
Here's the rest of the piece, carrying the same register through to the close.
Looking at stress and rest through energy
Around that time, I began adjusting my training, and reading more about energy, stress, and the role of mitochondria in the body.
Under long-term stress, the body becomes remarkably efficient at directing energy towards whatever feels most urgent. It keeps us ready to respond, to solve problems, to press on.But the body's energy is not unlimited. Whatever is spent on staying alert and pressing on is drawn from the same reserve — and cannot be spent twice.Over time, this leaves less for repair, renewal, immune function — the quiet, ordinary maintenance on which long-term health depends.
This helped me make sense of the exhaustion I had felt while caring for my parents. I could sleep, yet wake only partly restored. I could keep moving through the day, but mostly on willpower. By evening, there was nothing left.
That kind of tiredness is not mended by one or two good nights of sleep. It comes from spending too long in a state where the body never quite returns to repair.
The hopeful part is this: recovery does not have to begin with anything dramatic. Proper sleep, steady nourishment, quiet, even a few brief moments of release across the day — each helps the body step down from constant alertness.
In time, I came to think about recovery in three layers:
Mini recovery — a few seconds or minutes; Mid-level recovery — fifteen minutes to a few hours; Macro recovery — weeks, months, sometimes a whole season.
1. Mini recovery: the moments that seem too small to matter
To me, mini recovery means the pauses that last from a few seconds to a few minutes.
When I first heard that thirty seconds could count as recovery, I was sceptical. Surely proper rest meant lying down, taking a full day off, going away somewhere quiet. But the more I read about stress, the more I came to see that small breaks carry real weight — especially when they arrive before we reach the point of complete exhaustion.
A short pause does not undo the stress of a day. But it can interrupt its steady accumulation. It opens a moment in which the breath can deepen, attention can soften, and the nervous system can begin to settle.
I learnt this first through running. During interval sessions, I began to use the short space between efforts more deliberately. Rather than checking my watch or bracing for the next repetition, I would spend thirty seconds attending only to my breathing, and to the feeling of my heart rate coming down.
At first, those pauses felt almost too small to count. Later, I understood they were part of what allowed me to finish the whole session well.
Eventually the same idea found its way into daily life. Between meetings, I stopped opening the next email straight away; I would stand, walk to the window, look out for a moment. After a difficult phone call, I might close my eyes and give myself half a minute before moving on. Sometimes I use scent in these pauses — not as a solution, but as a simple sensory cue that draws my attention back to the present.
When I arrive home, I sometimes pause before opening the door and say to myself:
"Leave the office outside. Walk in as a father and a husband."
These moments are not impressive. No one applauds them. They produce no immediate transformation. But without them, the pressure of the day builds without interruption — and surfaces later as irritability, overwhelm, or physical strain. These small pauses are what break that build-up.
Mini recovery is not emergency care after collapse. It is the space we give ourselves before it.
At Lanluis, this is how I think about the role of Mind. Scent may help create the pause, but the important part is not the essential oil itself. It is whether, for those thirty seconds, you are willing to bring your attention back from the outside world — and return to yourself.
2. Mid-level recovery: allowing yourself to feel settled again
Mid-level recovery lasts from around fifteen minutes to a few hours. It may not look as significant as a holiday, yet it is often what allows body and mind to feel settled again.
It might be an uninterrupted lunch. A walk after work. A bath taken without rushing. A quiet evening, or a regular stretch of time each week that belongs only to you.
For an endurance runner, it might be a full night's sleep after a long run, a properly nourishing meal, or an easy session in which pace and performance are deliberately set aside.
For me, it begins with some of these particular scenes. Some Sundays I run without the data, listening instead to my breathing and the sound of my footsteps. It reminds me that I do not run only for results. Some Sunday afternoons, I resist filling the day with work: the phone goes somewhere out of reach, and there is a slow meal with my family, a walk, conversation that does not need to be productive.
I have also come to treat bathing and skincare differently. Rather than tasks to be finished quickly, I try to notice the temperature of the water, the movement of my hands against the skin. It becomes a small way of acknowledging what the body has carried through the day.
For many women, this kind of time is treated as optional — something to enjoy only once everything else is done. But seen through the lens of recovery, it is not a luxury. It is one of the ways we protect ourselves from living permanently in a depleted state.
I was deeply moved by a story about the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh, during his rehabilitation after a stroke. He had to relearn the most basic movements: sitting, standing, swallowing. When he was at last able to hold a small cup of tea safely, his physiology team said: “Let’s begin a tea meditation session.” He did not hurry to set the cup down once the exercise was complete. He stayed with it. He looked at the tea, smiled at those around him, and placed a hand gently over his heart.
The moment was not only about physical rehabilitation. It was an expression of how fully he chose to meet the body he had in that moment — rather than rushing to recover the body he had before.
That image changed the way I thought about recovery. It does not always need to be grand. Sometimes it is fifteen uninterrupted minutes: a complete shower, a walk taken with full attention, a skincare ritual carried out without hurry. The length of time matters less than whether we are genuinely present.
At Lanluis, I connect this layer of recovery with Skin. Skincare, to me, is not only about appearance. It can be a quiet daily question:
Am I willing to spend these fifteen minutes caring for the body that has carried me through life?
3. Macro recovery: some forms of tiredness need a season
Macro recovery unfolds over weeks, months, sometimes seasons.
We do not always choose it willingly. Often, life brings us to a point where we realise that another weekend off, another good night's sleep, is no longer enough. Some forms of exhaustion run deeper.
A longer period of recovery makes room not only for rest, but for reflection: a chance to reconsider how we are living, what we value, and whether our pace still suits the person we have become.
Two periods of my life could be described as macro recovery.
The first came after my parents died. For a while, I chose not to take on too much that was new. I resisted the urge to fill every space in the diary. I let life become quieter. That gave me room to grieve, to think about my relationships with my family, to reconsider the way I worked — and, alongside the loss, to feel gratitude.
The second came after several marathons in close succession. I decided to spend a month without a training target. I did not stop running altogether, but I stopped measuring every run. I no longer chased pace or mileage. No session had to prove anything.
On the days I wanted to run, I ran gently, noticing the wind and my breathing. On the days I did not, I let the body be still.
For the first few weeks, I felt restless. A familiar voice kept asking whether I was wasting everything I had built. But slowly, the noise grew quieter. I remembered why I had enjoyed running in the first place. And when I returned to structured training, my fitness had not disappeared. If anything — because I had genuinely rested — both body and mind were more willing to move forward again.
At Lanluis, I connect this slower, seasonal kind of recovery with Core. Manuka honey has come to symbolise something for me about nourishment: very little that truly sustains us can be rushed. A spoonful each day promises no dramatic change by tomorrow. But when care is repeated over weeks and months, something steadier begins to build — a resilience formed over time, rather than the excitement of another short challenge.
Recovery is not another word for laziness
The more I hold these three layers together, the clearer one thing becomes.
Recovery is not the opposite of discipline. It is a more attentive form of it.
It asks us to make a little breathing room when life is at its busiest. It asks us to protect a small piece of time when we are tired. And at certain turning points, it asks us to admit that a longer adjustment may be needed.
I do not want my children to remember me as someone who was forever pushing himself to the limit. I hope they see someone who understood when to move forward, when to stop, and when to take care of himself. When they face their own pressures, losses and changes, I do not want endurance to be the only response they know. I want them to understand that caring for yourself is not selfish. It is part of the responsibility you carry — towards yourself, and towards the people you love.
For the person who is tired now
If you have read this far, perhaps you are carrying a tiredness that is difficult to explain.
You may be caring for ageing parents while balancing work and family. Your body may be offering signs that are harder and harder to ignore: broken sleep, a shorter temper, skin that reacts more easily than it once did.
It is not that you do not care about your health. It is that too many things require you to keep going first.
I am not going to ask you to try harder. Most likely, you are trying very hard already.
Instead — before you run the next mile for someone else — perhaps you might offer yourself one small moment of recovery today.
It may be thirty seconds to breathe properly, with a scent you enjoy. It may be a complete shower and skincare ritual, with the door closed and the phone left in another room. Or it may be allowing one weekend, or one season, to hold a little less output and a little more time with yourself and the people who matter.
What kind of recovery do you need most?
If a sentence or an image in this article made you feel understood, then it has done what I hoped. Not another item for your list — but a reminder that energy can be reclaimed gradually: thirty seconds at a time, fifteen minutes at a time, and sometimes over the course of a whole season.
When we learn to restore ourselves in these small and larger ways, we are not merely resting. We are building a self that is less easily worn down.
True vitality does not mean never becoming tired. It means knowing how to recover.
About Lanluis
Lanluis is the brand I founded, shaped by care passed from one generation to the next: my mother's wisdom, my own experience as a son, and what our family has learnt about looking after both body and mind.
To me, essential oils offer the mind a moment to pause. Skincare is a way of acknowledging the body and all that it carries. Manuka honey is a reminder that true nourishment is built over time.
Together, these form three dimensions of vitality — Mind, Skin and Core — and support the ongoing practice of recovery, on the road and beyond it.
Johnathan