Every pace has a place.

Growing up in Laois it was hurling and the farm. That was the whole of it. I played for the county the whole way up. I stood on the pitch in Croke Park at fourteen years of age and the only thing I wanted in the world was to come back there one day as a senior.

My brother Anthony was the one who took it seriously. Obsessed with hurling. Obsessed with health and fitness years before anyone was talking about it. He drank twice in his life. When he got sick he became the strength and conditioning coach for our club, because sitting still was never going to be an option for him. That was Anthony.

He collapsed at work at twenty. He was gone at twenty one.

I was in third year of college. I did not deal with it. I went the other way entirely. Stopped coming home at weekends. Drank more, went out more, told myself I was living life to the full because life is short. I was not living. I was running.

Then one day on the pitch, a fella marking me leaned in and asked how my brother was. Anthony was already gone. He knew that.

After that I was angry every time I picked up a hurl. Looking for trouble, looking to rise someone, looking for a row. Until one day I stopped and thought, why am I even doing this. This is not me. So I walked away from the game altogether.

And then I kept running. New Zealand, on a dairy farm, and I had never milked a cow in my life. A ski resort after that. Australia. America. Canada. I kept going until I got to the point where there was nowhere left to go.

It caught up with me anyway. Everything I had not dealt with in my head started showing up in my body instead. I felt wrecked and I had no idea why. Nobody was talking about mental health then, not where I was from, so I had nobody to say it to.

What got me back was the simplest thing going. I started in the gym and I went sixty weeks, back to back, no gaps. I had never stuck at anything in my life. I was the fella who ran from everything. Sixty weeks of just turning up gave me something I had not had in years, and that was the belief that I could.

Around the same time I worked out what I actually loved. I love a good pair of socks and I love the sort of line that gets you out the door on a morning when you have nothing. So I put the two together. That was the entire plan. It was never meant to be anything more than socks.

A mate summed it up better than I ever could. I ran halfway around the world to get away from it, and I came back and started a running company.

So Step One is not about pace. It is not about your splits, your personal best or your VO2 max. Every other brand is chasing the elites. I am here for the person at the back of the pack. The one going out to clear their head. The one who is carrying something that nobody around them can see.

You do not have to fix the whole thing today. You just have to take the first step. Win the war inside.