THEY were the only human beings I saw all week.

It is 8pm on Thursday and everyone is coming together to thank the NHS staff who are relentlessly showing up every day to a world most of us will not see and will hardly be able to imagine.

I hang out of my window attempting to clap my hands with one arm while saying hello to the family opposite.

It is a strange existence but this is the norm of life for me in lockdown.

The delivery man now doesn’t even come inside to drop off my food. He just rings the bell and leaves, and as of today they will no longer even ring the buzzer.

I lie in my bed dreading the sound of a helicopter hovering over the house late at night. It is a sound you never hear unless its a police helicopter or air ambulance and it makes me wonder what’s happening outside.

I haven’t been outside now for almost five whole weeks. So these fleeting sounds of helicopters late at night certainly spark my curiosity.

My daily exercise routine currently involves jumping on my indoor bike and joining the thousands of cyclists on an online cycling platform called Zwift.

But I can’t help but look out the window thinking what it would be like to go outside on my bike.

On Thursday night there was close to 27,000 people riding around this virtual London. It was probably busier in the virtual world than it was on the actual streets.

I know that we are all allowed out of our homes if we are not exhibiting any symptoms of coronavirus. But I also know this virus can be airborne for up to three hours according to scientists.

So as I hear the builder in my street coughing, I stop short of my front door and make my way to the back room. Back into the safety of my new-found virtual world.

My friend Trevor who lives next door gets out every morning on his bike as he goes around London delivering food to vulnerable people.

We now know him as Trevoroo Deliveries.

It is a far cry from his normal job of one of the UK’s leading handbag designers. But on his ride this week he sent me some photos, and it was unreal to see the London streets deserted. He cycled past Buckingham Palace and there wasn’t a person in sight. It looked like a ghost town.

Normally I follow the mantra of living in the present. It is something I strive for daily. But yesterday I presented a question whilst doing a mental resilience group call to the sales team at Nike asking how we could not just survive Covid-19, but how we could thrive and perform at our best under stressful situations.

If we are locked down for months, how do we manage going back into society?

It is a very important question, one that maybe most of us have not thought about, as we were told at first that this was just a three-week lockdown.

But what if it isn’t a three-week lockdown? What if it ends up being six months?

Have you prepared for what that might mean? How would you cope? What would your Covid-19 resilience tool kit look like? Who will you be on the other side of this as a person?

I know that after my 2016 surgery, when I had no control of what was going on, I came out of those six months in hospital as a different person.

I had grown as a person but I struggled to get back into a social norm. The first dinner I attended was at the home I was staying at in Bath where I found I had lost my skill of talking with people without sharing hospital stories that were not really meant for casual conversation over dinner.

I found that I started isolating myself to avoid social situations. It took me time to integrate back into society and find a new norm.

So as we pray that those who are suffering from this horrid virus recover and we start to see it slow down, our release back into society looms above us.

I am sure we will still have a fear that this virus won’t have gone entirely and that we might still be at risk.

As my good friend Steve Bate said to me on the phone the week, it’s like being on expeditions in the mountains and sharing a tent.

The first few weeks are great fun, then when you start to become tired and the weeks go on, the smallest things start to annoy you.

I remember when I was on a ski camp in Chile and we were having breakfast at 4:30am every morning and one of the team had a clicking jaw.

The first few weeks I didn’t even notice it, then around week four when we were all tired and fatigued, his jaw was driving everyone mad!

We could all get a bit like this, as we adjust to indefinite lockdown with our families. So ask yourself what you have in place to help you manage this. Start to think about how this may look.

A few weeks at home are nice, it’s new, you have the time to do all those jobs and spend time with the family. But after a few months it may start to become a challenge.

Remember this might not be a sprint. It could be more like an ultra marathon, so its important we pace this and have a strategy.