WOMEN’S HEALTH WEEK - 2022

I have never been so consistently sweaty. Relentlessly sweaty. There is sweat stinging my eyes and running down the backs of my knees. Sweat is dripping off the end of my pony tail and leaving whip marks on my t-shirt. I think even my fingernails are sweaty.

I love it.

That’s a completely new sensation. I’m a journalist and if I look back in the archives, I must have written a dozen times over the years about the many attempts I’ve made to start running.

Years ago, in my early 20s, a work colleague mentioned she was going to run a 10k and asked if anyone would like to keep her company. I have an almost compulsive need to throw my hat into every single ring and so yes, sure, I said. How hard could a 10k be?

I mentioned it at dinner with my then-boyfriend’s mother and sister. They looked aghast. His mother asked when the race was. Six weeks away, I said.

“You’ll never do it,” she replied, repeating this several times to make sure I really got the message. I did not get the message.

In the intervening few weeks I ran around Drumpellier Country Park’s main loch a couple of times and called it training. The day of the race arrived and off we went. To everyone’s astonishment, except mine because I was so utterly ignorant of what was involved, I completed that 10k in 63 minutes. I didn’t even have trainers. I ran it in a pair of Adidas Campus, sort of fancy gutties.

Job done, I didn’t run again for about 10 years. What got me going again was The Moira Run in Queen’s Park. Moira Jones, a smart, loving, funny woman, was murdered in the park in 2008 and her grieving parents, Bea and Hu, set up The Moira Fund in her honour.

The annual 5k run raises money for the charity. Having interviewed Bea Jones and come away with a sense of awe at the woman, I had to take part. Crikey though. While I managed a 10k with relatively little fuss, this run of just half the length nearly finished me.

Youth is, indeed, wasted on the young and I find myself nagging anyone I meet under the age of 30 to seize every minute, like a wizened old crone. It turns out aging bodies need a bit more work.

I always aspire to train and run the Moira Run properly, without stopping. Every year since 2014 I’ve set myself this target. And so I download the Couch25k app – I’ve done so many versions – and I try to complete it but never do. I just do not have the willpower.

It turns out, of course, that you get by with a little help from your friends. My friend Johnpaul urged me to sign up to Glasgow Frontrunners and take part in the Couch25k course. What the heck, I thought, may as well give this another bash.

It’s just about the best decision I’ve made. I was so nervous coming to the club. In quite a short space of time I had put on several stone that I’ve never been able to shift. I used to accompany a friend to Slimming World where I was quite literally a fat failure. I’ve tried so many diets to absolutely no effect whatsoever.

I didn’t want to be the slowest, I didn’t want to hold the group back. I worried I would simply not progress.

There is a gender split in sport and fitness. Participation tends to be about equal across genders when children are young but when girls start to reach puberty, engagement falls away. There are myriad reasons for this: some sports are seen as being “for boys”; girls are
objectified and pressure put on them to look a certain way; a lack of confidence; a lack of opportunities. This follows into adulthood with fewer women involved in sport than men.

It’s dismal that girls still shy away from sport in such skewed numbers, missing out on a lifetime of activity with the friendship and physical and mental health benefits that come with it.

I danced. As a kid I was obsessed with ballet. I heard a Scottish Ballet dancer once refer to her sister, also a dancer, as “a bloody bunhead” (you have to imagine it in an Australian accent for the full effect) and that was me – a bloody bunhead.

It’s brilliant now to see a diversity of body shapes on stage and participating in dance. Scottish Ballet has worked really hard, also, on inclusion, and breaking down gender stereotypes, which are highly prevalent in the art form. But when I was a teenager and dancing a lot, the accepted aesthetic was skinny. As skinny as you could go.

I look at photographs of myself as a girl, teenager and young woman and don’t really recognise myself. I’m mostly collar bone and hungry eyes. I had two diet modes – eat nothing or eat everything in sight.

In a way, not worrying about my weight or how I looked as I moved into my 30s was an act of resistance against social pressures and an act of care and respect for myself. Which is all very well, until you can’t get up a flight of stairs without huffing and puffing.

I still take adult ballet classes with Scottish Ballet and I commute by bike, so I’ve never fallen into the percentage of women – nearly 40% -- who aren’t active enough to get the full benefits of it.

I did want to be more active. Or even fit, if such a thing could be possible. The problem was, I thought it wasn’t possible but, happily, I was completely wrong.

Being part of Glasgow Frontrunners has turned everything upside down. The jog leaders are so encouraging and supportive while the other runners are just sweethearts. When I completed Couch25k and was given a photograph of my group at our graduation run I had a little cry. I had finally achieved something I had been trying and failing at for years.

I have become a woman who looks forward to running. Who actually puts her trainers on and goes out for a run on her own. I had done parkrun in Queen’s Park for a number of years but had to walk large parts of the route. Now I have a sub-30 minute time, which is some sort of miracle.

I want to put good food in my body because I want to be healthy and improve my running and so some weight has come off without much effort. I’ve started F45 classes – a kind of super intensive circuit training – and I can do the classes without feeling like I might be
sick. I put that down to running because I found them intolerable before. Running has boosted my stamina so much that I also look forward to F45.

I hardly know myself, but I like myself, and I’m going to keep running because of that.