O TYM ODCINKU
Charlotte Hogan has been running for over 20 years. Her mum is in her 70s and still runs 400 metres for Great Britain. She herself has done over 100 half marathons, a handful of trail ultras, and is about to run 40 miles for her 40th birthday along the towpath from Bristol to Gloucester. She's also the founder of Queen Square Run Club - one of Bristol's biggest community run clubs, three runs a week, 30 to 50 people per session, donuts on a Friday morning.
But there was a period where she couldn't get out of bed. Where she'd sit on the tube to work and not recognise the person looking back at her in the window. Where she moved her chair around the corner in an open-plan office so nobody would come and talk to her. Where she switched her phone off because she didn't want people messaging. Where someone in her family eventually had to drive to London to bring her home.
That was at 28. It took five years and multiple attempts to get a formal diagnosis of major recurrent depression. She's been hospitalised. She found the right therapist in 2020. Third medication attempt found something that works. She's still with that therapist now.
In December 2023, she stopped drinking. What started as a quiet New Year turned into a Dry January that turned into April, when her partner went back to drinking on his birthday and she just kept going. Nearly three years later, she hasn't looked back - though she'll tell you honestly that the first holiday sober felt really strange, that the ceremonial airport pint is harder to let go of than people think, and that it took a full year before she noticed the real difference in her body after decades of drinking.
This week, Charlotte joins Rich and Andy to talk about all of it. The binge drinking culture she grew up in. The green hockey jumper at Southampton that smelled of last week's drinks. The Sunday sessions in Clapham starting at 10am. The way depression and alcohol blur into each other until you can't tell which one started first. And the run club that she built from three people in a square to a community that held her when she couldn't hold herself.
She's also just launched the Bristol Wellbeing Guide — a one-stop shop for accessible, free and low-cost wellbeing resources in Bristol, built from her own experience of knowing what she needed but not being able to find it.
Plus: 60 laps of Queen Square in November for Talk Club's men's mental health campaign. And a mum who's just broken her own European record.
Find Charlotte at @QueenSquareRunClub and @BristolWellbeingGuide on Instagram.
