How to Find Gratitude When Everything Goes Wrong Lessons from Running on a Broken Foot

Day 2013. I'm standing in a hospital having just had a fracture confirmed in my third metatarsal. My right foot is in a wedged boot the size of a small building. I'm miles from home, I've had a long day, and I've still got the journey back ahead of me. By most reasonable measures, today was grim.

And yet, sitting with all of that, I found myself genuinely grateful.

Not in a forced, positive-thinking kind of way. Not in the way people perform gratitude for social media. I mean the real, quiet kind — the kind that comes when you look at where you are, what you've come through, and realise that the difficulty itself is part of the story you're building.

I want to talk about that today. Because I think gratitude during dark moments is one of the most misunderstood things there is.

When I look back at 2013 consecutive days of running — now 20,130km into a goal of 40,075km, the equivalent of circling the Earth — I can tell you that the run has not always been comfortable. I've dealt with calf tears, plantar fasciitis, hamstring pulls, blisters that took weeks to manage, and more than a few moments where stopping felt like the only sensible option. A broken metatarsal is just the latest addition to that list. And still, I put on the boot and I walked my five kilometres.

That is not me boasting. I want to be clear about that. It's not about toughness or bravado. It is about the fact that when you have committed to something long enough, when the goal is bigger than any single day, you find a way. And I am genuinely grateful that I can still find that way.

There's something I keep coming back to, which is the idea of opposing forces. For every situation — no matter how difficult — there is a positive and a negative side. I know that might sound simple, and in truly dire circumstances it can take real effort to find it. But it is always there. The challenge is not pretending the negative doesn't exist. It does. A broken foot is a broken foot. Today was hard. But refusing to look for the other side doesn't make the difficulty go away — it just removes the counterweight.

Today, alongside the hospital visit, I was working on turning properties around, getting them back into a condition where people can actually live in them properly, placing tenants. Real progress. Progress that matters. When I held both of those things at the same time — the frustration of the injury alongside the progress in the work — the day looked different. Not easy. But purposeful.

There's a principle I think about often, adapted from ideas around habits and human effectiveness. The premise is simple: roughly ten percent of what happens in your life is completely outside your control. Things will go wrong. Injuries happen. Setbacks happen. Difficult days happen. You cannot stop that ten percent from arriving. But the other ninety percent — how you respond, how you carry yourself, what you choose to focus on — that is yours. All of it. And that is a genuinely profound thing when you sit with it.

Most of us, myself included at times, give that ten percent far too much power. We let the thing we couldn't control dictate how we feel for hours, or days, or longer. The broken foot could become the whole story. But it isn't. It's one chapter in 2013 days of a streak that is still going.

I've spoken before about why this mission exists. The 40,075km goal is not a vanity project. It is tied to raising over one million pounds for children's causes — including Great Ormond Street Hospital and BBC Children in Need. Every single kilometre matters. Every day I continue to move, even in a boot, even through an injury that would stop most people, I am adding to that total. 19,945km still to go. I am just past the halfway point of the Earth's circumference, and I am walking a fraction of it today in a hospital boot.

That, too, is something to be grateful for.

It strikes me that we often wait for things to be going well before we allow ourselves to feel grateful. We treat gratitude as a reward for positive circumstances. But the people I observe who seem to carry real inner steadiness — the ones who are consistent regardless of what life throws at them — they do not wait. They find the counterweight in the difficult moment itself.

I am not saying this is easy. It was not easy today. There was frustration, fatigue, and genuine physical pain. The journey home felt long. But somewhere in the middle of it, I realised that the difficulty is not separate from the mission — it is part of it. If everything were smooth, the streak would mean far less. The lows are what give the highs any real weight.

You will not appreciate the progress you make without first knowing what it costs you.

That is the lesson I am carrying from day 2013. Not that broken feet are somehow fine. Not that you should push through everything regardless of consequence. But that even in the genuinely hard moments, you can find something real to hold onto. Something that reminds you why you are doing this and that the doing of it still matters.

If you are going through something difficult right now — and I know some of you reading this are — I would ask you to look for the opposing force. Not to dismiss what is hard. But to find the thing that is also true, alongside the difficulty. It is there. It takes effort to find it sometimes, but it is always there.

Day 2013. Boot on. Still moving. Still grateful.