A beginners guest post from team member Ruth Holmes-Davitt
Apart from my early teenage years up until a few years ago I was very firmly a ‘walker’. I walked most days throughout the year and often would be averaging approx 50 – 60 miles a week.
At my fittest I was a very fast walker, so fast in fact that I would quite literally be holding myself back from breaking into a run. Being an above average size bust my motto was ‘these boobies aren’t made for running’. Then I discovered how far sport bra technology had come and thought ‘what the heck’.
I tried running but felt that it just wasn’t for me because I would very quickly be gasping for breath and feeling yuk. After a few failed attempts over about six months I found that there was this fantastic app for my phone created by the NHS: Couch to 5K designed to get you fully running in 9 weeks using a ‘walk/run’ approach.
The first thing that I learnt from it was that I was ‘trying to hard’, the point was not to run as hard as you could but to run at pace that allowed you to complete the ‘run section’.
That was a game changer for me. Each session was about 30 mins, by the end of the 9 weeks I was happily completing the session and then just carrying on jogging along. I never did get to 5K in 30 minutes as speed isn’t my thin,g but did steadily build up to running 4 – 5 miles regularly.
Then 2 years ago I came down with a severe chest infection followed by another two of them in the following months. Just as that sorted itself out I developed a groin injury, basically because I was starting from scratch and being impatient with my body and recovery.
I went through a huge learning curve about the importance of building back up slowly and the importance of NOT spending the time on the injury bench feeling sorry for myself and wailing ‘I can’t run or walk, give me more cake!’
Now I had to contend with building up my fitness with the addition of a good couple of stone to drag around with me.
The positive outcome of that is that have empathy with the customers I speak with at Advance Performance, I know how it feels to struggle and how hard it can be to go from ‘no fitness’ to ‘getting out there’.
Blog by Ruth Holmes-Davitt