Day 2058. 15,920.84 kilometres covered on a barefoot-style running streak with one aim: complete a single lap of the world and raise £1 million for children's causes. I run every single day. Some days, the thinking on the move matters as much as the distance.

Today I want to talk about bitterness. Not in a dramatic way. Not with names or details. Honestly, because I suspect a lot of people carry this and never say it out loud.

Over the past twelve months or so, I noticed something in myself I did not like. A quiet bitterness building around relationships broken down over the years before. Nothing dramatic. The kind of slow resentment building when you feel wronged and never fully process the feeling. Awareness arrived first. Dealing with the feeling was something else entirely.

Bitterness is a horrible trait. I know this. Most people carrying bitterness know this too, which is partly why the feeling is so uncomfortable. You know bitterness is not serving you. You know it changes how you come across. And yet the feeling sits there.

What makes it harder is when a relationship breakdown is not between two people alone. When a fallout involves a group, a family, a shared circle of friends, you feel the pull of loyalty. You feel an unspoken expectation about whose side you are on and how you are supposed to feel about the other party. Before you know it, you are carrying resentment not entirely yours to carry. The resentment arrived via association.

This is where I had to be honest with myself. Some of what I was carrying was never mine at all. Passed to me, consciously or not, through the natural process of people I care about falling out with people they used to care about.

Here is what I have been working on. No clean answer. No tidy resolution. More of a deliberate shift in thinking.

Nine times out of ten, relationship breakdowns come down to a difference of opinion. Two people who see something differently. The problem is most of us, myself included, are wired to assume our way of seeing things is the correct one. The view feels obvious. The view feels like fact. But because something feels true to me does not make the view objectively true. Because someone chose a different path, or saw things in a way I disagreed with, does not make them wrong. Holding this as a real belief is much harder than saying the words.

But even in cases where you feel genuinely wronged, a more useful response than bitterness exists. What I have been practising is feeling sorry for the person instead.

I want to be careful about how I say this because the intent needs to be clear. The approach sounds patronising if not explained properly. When I step back from the resentment and consider what must be happening in someone's life for them to act in the way they did, something changes inside me. The emotion shifts from bitterness toward something closer to compassion. And compassion, unlike bitterness, does not eat you from the inside out.

This is the reframe. Not about letting people off the hook. Not about pretending things were fine when they were not. This is about choosing how you hold the experience. And the choice affects not only how you feel privately but how you present yourself to everyone around you.

Bitterness leaks. Bitterness comes out in tone, in energy, in the way you talk about people, in the things you choose not to say. And the people around you, including those with nothing to do with the original situation, pick it up. The reframe leaks too. In a much better direction.

I think about the mission ahead. 40,075 kilometres total. Running every consecutive day in barefoot-style Vibram FiveFingers. Raising £1 million for children's causes including Great Ormond Street Hospital and BBC Children in Need. The mission needs me present, consistent, and clear. Bitterness works against all of those things. The children this run is for do not need me bitter. They need me focused.

Day 2058 is one more day of showing up. Not in a physical sense alone. The inner work is what keeps the streak meaningful rather than mechanical. Relationships change over the course of a running streak this long. People come and go. Circumstances shift. What I control is who I am becoming in the middle of all of it.

The reframe from bitterness to compassion is part of the work. Not complete. A work in progress. But I am on it.

If this resonates, I hope the reflection is useful. If you want to follow the mission toward 40,075 kilometres and £1 million for children's causes, the links are below. Every share puts the mission in front of more people. And that is what this runs on.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/eGw-0JLMESk