Pilates Thoughtful Tuesday: What Are You Carrying?

Marathon runner carries symbolic weight, highlighting resilience, purpose, and unseen personal struggles

Some stories stop you mid-scroll, not because they are polished or dramatic, but because they are real. Recently, many people watched a man run the London Marathon carrying a fridge on his back. At first glance, it looks absurd. It almost invites a quick judgement, something extreme for attention. But the moment you understand why, the whole thing shifts.

Jordan Adams ran that marathon after losing his mother to frontotemporal dementia, often shortened to FTD. For those unfamiliar with it, FTD is a form of dementia that tends to affect people at a younger age than more widely known types such as Alzheimer’s disease. Rather than memory being the first issue, it often shows up through changes in behaviour, personality, and communication. Families often describe it as watching someone change in front of them, long before a formal diagnosis is even made.

Diagnosis itself is rarely straightforward. There is no single test that confirms FTD. It usually involves neurological assessments, cognitive testing, input from family members about behavioural changes, and brain imaging such as MRI or CT scans. In some cases, genetic testing is used, particularly where there is a known family link. By the time it is confirmed, the impact is often already being felt in daily life.

Jordan’s mother died in her early fifties, and both he and his brother now live with the knowledge that they are highly likely to face the same condition themselves. That is not a distant possibility. It is something they carry every day. And yet, instead of stepping back, they stepped forward. The fridge he carried was not just for attention. It represented weight.

The kind that is not always visible, but always present.

What sits at the centre of his message is surprisingly simple. Whatever you are carrying, you are not carrying it alone. You do not get to choose what life throws at you, but you do get to choose how you respond to it. For him, it has become what he calls a licence to live. Not in a reckless sense, but in a conscious one. If something is coming, then the time before it matters even more.

When you look at it through that lens, it becomes less about the spectacle and more about the decision behind it. Life places things on us that we did not ask for. Some are manageable, some are not, and some feel completely overwhelming. In Pilates, we spend a lot of time focusing on control, alignment, breath, and precision. We look at how the body moves and how it can move better. But underneath all of that, there is always something else going on.

Every client who walks into a session is carrying something. It may not be as visible as a fridge, but it is there. Stress, loss, uncertainty, responsibility. These things influence posture, breathing patterns, tension, and even the ability to focus. You see it in the way someone holds themselves, in how they respond to challenge, and in how they move through a sequence. It is rarely just about strength or flexibility.

What stands out in this story is not just the physical challenge, but the mindset behind it. Faced with something deeply difficult and largely out of his control, Jordan Adams chose to respond with purpose. He turned something heavy into something meaningful. That does not remove the reality of what he is facing, but it changes the way he lives alongside it.

There is a strong connection here to the Pilates method, even if it is not immediately obvious. Pilates has always been about awareness and choice. It gives people a way to reconnect with their bodies and regain a sense of control, even when other parts of life feel uncertain. It does not remove the weight someone is carrying, but it can change how they carry it.

As teachers, this is where the work becomes more than just delivering exercises. It is about recognising that what you see physically is only part of the picture. The role is not to fix everything, because that is neither realistic nor appropriate. But you can create an environment where people feel supported, where they feel seen, and where, even for a short time, the weight feels lighter.

The image of someone running a marathon with a fridge on their back stays with you because it makes the invisible visible. It reminds us that everyone is dealing with something, whether we see it or not. And perhaps the real takeaway is this. We may not have control over what we carry, but we do have some control over how we carry it, and who we allow to walk alongside us.

And in that sense, what we do in Pilates matters more than we sometimes realise. It is not just about movement. It is about giving people a space where they remember that they are not doing this alone.