Like a lot of runners I didn’t enjoy running at school, mainly because of the way it was taught, the teachers used to point to the right and say “One lap of the school, off you go.” Sometimes they didn’t even point.
If you weren’t in the first five to finish then you were an idiot. Also, if you weren’t ‘playing football hard enough’ you were made to run laps of the pitch as a punishment (different times I know) so I didn’t much like running.
Twenty years passed before I returned to running in an effort to lose weight. Starting with the goal of running 5K, I found that away from the school system of using running as a punishment I actually loved to run. I’m big so I’ve always trained; boxing, weight lifting, power lifting, Salsa dancing, I even became a Salsa instructor for a while, before I became a Coach and the running took over.
One of the great things about running is that you don’t need a membership, you don’t need any special equipment or even any form of training. I liked getting away from my desk where I had been working as a solicitor for nearly twenty years, I loved the endorphins and I especially loved seeing how I was improving, getting better week by week.
I still remember the first time I ran 5K, it took 48 minutes (on a treadmill) and I was shattered at the end of it. I was a mess. A few days later I did it again, and then I did it again, I ran faster and then I ran further. I found that I could run 10K. I kept going, I joined a running club and managed to run 13.1 miles (a half marathon) and then in Edinburgh I ran my first marathon. 26.2 miles. It was wonderful.
So I did it again, Snowdon, Barcelona, London, Liverpool. I was on fire.
Then, in 2012 whilst training for my next marathon, I was diagnosed with Type I Diabetes (see my Diabetes page for more on that). I thought that the diagnosis would mean that I would have to live a smaller life as constant insulin injections and food management would make marathon running close to impossible, but thanks to a fantastic consultant and superb medical team, I quietly started to make the changes required, all with the goal to run another marathon.
Since diagnosis I have completed more marathons with Type I Diabetes than I have without. I became an Assistant Coach and then a Coach In Running Fitness with England Athletics and made the decision to give up being a lawyer so that I could concentrate on writing and coaching.
