Welcome to episode 111 of the Women’s Running podcast. I’m your host, Esther Newman, and she’s your other host, Holly Taylor. We start this podcast just as you might imagine, with a full debrief of the first episode of Bake Off. Then we’re on to the boring running bits:  we talk about preparing for the long runs, and the psychological tricks our minds play on us.

I am SO proud of Holly, her long runs have been going spectacularly and she’s surprised herself with how brilliant she’s felt during them, and after them, recovering quickly and well. We talk about pace – we still haven’t quite got to grips with this yet! And we remind ourselves to focus on our ‘why’ – which is very different from our goals. My goal is to run all the way round without stopping for any considerable amount of time. But the why is why I’m doing it in the first place – and mostly it’s to prove that I can do it. And in order to do it, that doesn’t have a focus on time, that has a focus on getting to the finish line, no matter what the time is. So I’m going to work really really hard in those first few miles to keep  an eye on my pace and bring it right down, so that I have an easy first half (hopefully an easy first three quarters) so that the last bit isn’t that awful.

We talk about our first ever Podcast Live, taking place this Thursday 29th September, which I just have to get in there. It’s free for patrons, so head over to patreon.com/womensrunning to sign up.

We chat too about the pros and cons of a running coach – and discuss whether they’re for the rest of us and not just for elites. And we talk through a reader email who has some nerves ahead of a race – and we truly empathise with all of that! Next podcast will be recorded the DAY AFTER the London Marathon. Oh em gee, wish me luck!

Links

This episode is sponsored by Maaree, makers of the most wonderful running bras in the whole wide world. Fact.

Please support us on Patreon and you can join us on Thursday 29th September for a chat on Zoom!

Get your hands on Women’s Running magazine for half price, and bag yourself a pair of exclusive Monkey Sox running socks! Just enter X22WRP at the checkout.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode we welcome back Friend of the Pod, Anna Harding, a woman who has knocked out a number of marathons and ultras. I wanted to get her back to pick her brains about tapering. However, turns out she’s an old hand at the Great North Run, which I’ve just run, so we kick off by talking about that... We talk about the brilliance of the great north run – the crowds, the route, the atmosphere – it was all such an incredible day, and it’s lovely to reminisce.

Then I pick her brains about the taper that we’re in the middle of right now before the London Marathon. Holly is also ramping up her miles towards her half marathon, so we talk about the goals we need to be thinking about on the days of our races, and strategies to keep us sane and moving on those tricky miles. Anna has some fantastic advice on how to tick through the miles, and also some spot on practical advice for these last days before the marathon, with exactly what sort of running and mileage we should be doing in the last two weeks, and what we also need to be doing to give ourselves the best chance on the start line. Two big takeaways here – wash your hands lots to avoid catching any bugs in these last precious days, and get lots of sleep!

At the end of the chat, Anna has some Big News about her next goal race – put it this way, the Loch Ness Marathon is in a week or so, and she’s running it as one of her training long runs. So it’s not that. It’s a teensy bit longer....

Links

Holly and I are doing our first Women’s Running Podcast Live event on Zoom on Thursday 29th September! The small catch is that it’s exclusively for patrons, but the massive upside here is that it’s only 2 quid a month to become one of our patrons. Our Live event is at 7pm on Thursday 29th September, we’d love you to join us. Join us on Patreon, and we’ll send you a link to join us next Thursday. We can’t wait to meet you!

Follow Anna on Instagram.

Do please email us at [email protected] with any questions or running stories, as we’d love to include them in a future podcast. 

Get your hands on your first issue of Women’s Running magazine for just £1. Just enter WRSS22POD at the checkout.

Thank you for listening. Email us at [email protected] with any questions or running stories, as we’d love to include them. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to episode 109 of the Women’s Running podcast. I’m Esther Newman, your host, and she’s Holly Taylor, your other host. We kick off this week’s episode by talking about corrective eyewear, as you would probably expect. This segment finishes (finally) with Holly explaining how we can all get a “Beers For Life” token from her family. 

We finally get on to running and then chat about distraction techniques on longer runs, which Holly has been using as she’s upping her mileage in her half marathon training. At this point I was still worried about upweighting the Great North Run into a longer run, but that will be all over and done with by the time this comes out, so fingers crossed it all went to plan!

We talk strength training again, as a result of the workout that Holly did this week, which destroyed her slightly. So our main focus here is the dreaded DOMs and how to minimise them, and recover from them.

We also talk about what it’s like to live with people who aren’t as enthusiastic about your running as you are – we’d love to know your thoughts on this. We hope your training and running is going well as we head into Autumn! I personally love Autumn because there’s no danger of me having to wear a vest, so there we have it.

Links:

Find your new favourite bra at Maaree.

Please support us on Patreon and you’ll get some lovely patron-only perks, including an exclusive newsletter from me and Holly! 

Get your hands on your first issue of Women’s Running magazine for just £1. Just enter WRSS22POD at the checkout.

Thank you for listening. Email us at [email protected] with any questions or running stories, as we’d love to include them. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to episode 108 of the Women’s Running Podcast. I’m your host Esther Newman, and she’s your other host, Holly Taylor. Holly’s half marathon training is going well, and she’s tentatively enthusiastic about tackling longer distances with her running buddy, and considering potentially a bit of walk running.

We talk here about strength training, and the stuff we can do to support our running, and make everything easier. I talk to Holly about some simple bits of strength training she can do – and all of them are bodyweight (so no equipment required) and she can do them at home. Equally if she fancies a trip to the gym, she could easily do this using weights or machines at the gym to get a bigger session in. The trick here is to simplify strength training – it doesn’t need to be a billion different moves, and it doesn’t need to be complicated. Divvy yourself up into three sections: arms and shoulders, core (stomach, back and hips), and legs. Then think of three exercises – something like press ups, crunches and lunges. Do them 10 times, and repeat three times. And Bob is most firmly your uncle. Running will be, progressively more easy. And after a few weeks you can add in weights, up your reps, change up the exercises, whatever you like – you’ll find LOADS of strength training on our website.

I talk about my worries about running a half (the Great North Run) when I’m supposed to be running  20+ miles in training for the London Marathon, not 13.1, so I’m having to add a few miles on to it before or after. I want to know if anyone is doing something similar in the lead up to the marathon.

We finish up by talking about the dreaded chafe, and in this instance, specifically boob chafe. As Holly says, “you don’t want your tits to ruin your marathon”. Somehow she makes this an issue that she lays firmly at the door of the patriarchy, and who are we to disagree?

Links

Start your running journey or find inspiration for beating your personal best with Forestry England. 

Please support us on Patreon and you’ll get some lovely patron-only perks, including an exclusive newsletter from me and Holly! 

Get your hands on your first issue of Women’s Running magazine for just £1. Just enter WRSS22POD at the checkout.

Thank you for listening. Email us at [email protected] with any questions or running stories, as we’d love to include them. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to episode 107 of the Women’s Running podcast. I’m your host, Esther Newman, and she’s your other host, Holly Taylor. So in this episode it’s a bit of a game of two halves – despite our podcast dropping every week as normal, we’ve actually had a bit of a break, it being the summer holidays and all. But while I’ve been not-eating Cornish pasties, Holly has had a very different time of it. As candid as ever, she talks about the swerve in mental health she’s suffered over the past fortnight, and the tools she’s using to help bump her back up again. She also talks about how while she had once used running as one of those tools, this time around it’s been less helpful for her (all that said, we know that generally speaking running can be a brilliant support for our mental health). On my side of things, I’ve been training for the Great North Run in September and the London Marathon in October – I’ve just about kept up with my plan while on holiday, but I’ve found the change in terrain and the second heat wave very challenging. And while ostensibly I’m on track, my mind is spiralling with all the things that *could* go wrong, and also all the reasons why the bad runs were bad, and why the good runs were good, and how all these things are going to affect my races negatively one way or another. Please tell us how your training is going! We also talk about some emails we’ve had in on the back of our chats about heckling, and they’re really shocking. And again, do please let us know if you’ve had experiences like this – I think talking about it like we began to do during our We Will campaign is one of the best things we can do to raise awareness that this happens and how we feel as a result.

Links

This episode is sponsored by SportsShoes! Search London Marathon at sportsshoes.com and use the code WRPOD on all orders over £50 claim 10% off.

Please support us on Patreon and you’ll get some lovely patron-only perks, including an exclusive newsletter from me and Holly! 

Get your hands on your first issue of Women’s Running magazine for just £1. Just enter WRSS22POD at the checkout.

Thank you for listening. Email us at [email protected] with any questions or running stories, as we’d love to include them. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to episode 106 of the Women’s Running podcast. I’m your host Esther Newman, and she’s your other host, Holly Taylor. We’re started recording this at 2.30 in the afternoon, but we immediately start talking about cocktails. Turns out we’re nowhere near as sophisticated as we thought we were. After an enormous ramble on the perfect way to mix a Margarita we eventually get on to running. Holly’s in the thick of her half marathon training, and she’s having issues with DOMs (that’s Delayed Onset Muscle soreness to you and me). And so am I! So we talk about that a bit, and how to recover.

We also talk about the kit we’ve been wearing during the heatwave – I’m still firmly in my leggings and want to know what you wear if you also prefer to run covered up. Meanwhile, Hol talks about her adventures in finding the perfect pair of running shorts.

Then we launch into a controversial topic; weight loss and running. We chat about this because of a stupid thing I heard a fitness instructor suggesting about losing weight before beginning to run. We talk about damaging theories about weight and exercise, how we’ve both been affected by it, and how we need to combat crap advice like this and help encourage EVERYONE to run. Listen here – you do NOT need to lose weight to run!

Then we have just enough time to talk about managing parenting, school holidays and running  and we end with a rant about how we divvy up housework, because it seemed relevant at the time.

Links

This episode is sponsored by SportsShoes! SportShoes’ Running Hub is filled with the best expert advice, from training and nutrition, as well as news on the latest kit. They hope to inspire you to run stronger, better and happier – because it’s no fun standing still.

Please support us on Patreon and you’ll get some lovely patron-only perks, including an exclusive weekly newsletter from me and Holly! 

Get your hands on your first issue of Women’s Running magazine for just £1. Just enter WRSS22POD at the checkout.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to episode 105 of the Women’s Running podcast. I’m Esther Newman your host, and she’s Holly Taylor your other host. We’re both in the thick of our training this episode. Holly is a few weeks into her half marathon training, and it’s going well, albeit hampered slightly by the glorious weather we’ve been having. I’ve been holiday running, which has had its ups and downs. We’re both finding the temperature a struggle, and it’s made me question my fitness and whether I’m entirely ready for this marathon at all. We also talk about our brushes with anxiety recently, and how for the first time in my life it seems, running isn’t quite cutting it in terms of helping minimise my catastrophising, but I have a feeling that the dull book I’m listening to at the moment on Audible has something to do with it. We chat though general anxiety and running, and what we’ve been doing to combat the spiralling. We also take a swerve and chat about hydration and how best to keep on top of that in this weather, and when to start running with a hydration pack. Once we’ve got through that, we also have a chat about heckling, and how it can completely derail our running. In between all that it’s the usual nonsense so hold on to your running caps.

Links

Claim your three whole, proper sized full bottles of wine from Wine 52, and you just have to pay 8.95 to cover the cost of postage.

Please support us on Patreon and you’ll get some lovely patron-only perks, including an exclusive newsletter from me and Holly! 

Get your hands on your first issue of Women’s Running magazine for just £1. Just enter WRSS22POD at the checkout.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to episode 104 of the Women’s Running Podcast. I’m your host, Esther Newman, and she’s your other host, Holly Taylor. We start off by catching up after Holly’s holiday. Has she run while in Italy? I am firmly bating my breath, obviously. We then catch up on everything we’ve been doing in the huge heat that we’ve just experienced. I’ve been running as usual, but I’ve made sure to adjust my running to allow for the heat – taking walking breaks up the hills, and drinking way more water, and so far it’s working for me. But of course we have to talk about sweat because that’s a huge issue right now! And never was a sweat wicking top more needed than around me during the summer.

We also talk about sports and schools, nudged into it by an email from a lovely listener. As neither of us had the best experience at school in terms of team sports, this is a hugely emotive subject for us, and I know we won’t be alone. While tons of you will have had enormously positive experiences at school in PE, there are many of us that haven’t – so many of us were picked last, and felt unequal and unable to compete with the best of them. Thankfully, quite a lot has changed in PE since I was at school, but we still need to consider young girls in whom there is a massive drop off in engagement with sport when they hit puberty. Body shaming, self confidence, and simple practicalities all have their part to play. But so do we! We need to be encouraging our girls to enjoy the feeling of participating – not for the end goal of winning something, but for enjoyment itself. Just like we do. At the end we have a bonus section on a new animal that we hate on our running!

Links

Get your hands on your first issue of Women’s Running magazine for just £1. Just enter WRSS22POD at the checkout.

Please support us on Patreon and you’ll get some lovely patron-only perks, including an exclusive newsletter from me and Holly! 

Email us at [email protected] with any questions or running stories, as we’d love to include them. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to episode 103 of the Women’s Running podcast. I’m your host Esther Newman, and she’s your other host, Holly Taylor. In this episode of the podcast, we’re talking to the very lovely Sabrina Pace-Humphreys. But before that, Holly and I chat about ultrarunning and the races we’d be keen to take on. Then we chat to Sabrina, who we’ve had on the pod before but wanted to get on again because of three huge things. Firstly, she’s just completed the very brutal Spine Race and we want to find out ALL about it. No spoilers here, although I wil let you into a little quote she says, which is: “The Spine race makes the Marathon des Sables look like a picnic on a summer’s day” and that’s probably all you need to know. Secondly, we want to talk to her about her book, Black Sheep, which has just been published, in which among other things details the racism she experienced as the only black kid in a tiny village in England. Thirdly, we want to talk to her about the event she’s holding on September 11th this year, Black To The Trails, a day that she has created to encourage more black and brown people to run on trails. She’s encouraging everyone to attend if you’re interested in running trails for the first time, and it’s going to be a brilliant celebration of trail running, with lots of music, food and facepainting, as well as guided runs. Then Holly and I come back at the end to do the quiz that we didn’t have enough time to hold for Sab – Holly is in the hotseat and the theme is ultrarunning...

Links

Get your hands on your first issue of Women’s Running magazine for just £1. Just enter WRSS22POD at the checkout.

Please support us on Patreon and you’ll get some lovely patron-only perks, including an exclusive newsletter from me and Holly! 

Thank you for listening. Email us at [email protected] with any questions or running stories, as we’d love to include them. 

Join us at Black to the Trails

Pick up Sab’s brilliant book Black Sheep here

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to episode 102 of the Women’s Running podcast. I am your host, Esther Newman, and she’s your other host, Holly Taylor. We start today chatting nutrition and supplements. I’m a bit of a fan of things that promise the earth, but I also enjoy taking things that I *know* will help me recover quicker and potentially help me to prevent injuries – along with my strength work of course. So that leads us to discuss all things turmeric and collagen.

We also talk about the shoes that we’re running in, which range from everyday road shoes to brand new, interesting stuff that I just learnt from a company I’d met the week before.

We also talk about something a little bit controversial. This is surrounding the news about Eilish McColgan running the London Marathon. We are extremely excited about the news that she’s joining the elites, but what we found interesting were the comments about the news in more male-specific channels

This leads into a bit of a man slag off, which we thoroughly enjoy, but it is not a general observance so sorry to men everywhere (and here). We also chat about swallowing flies and over-reacting. We end on a miniature quiz, and what’s brilliant here is that Holly reckons that more people run the GNR than the entire population of Newcastle.

Links

If you like this podcast, you will love Women’s Running magazine. If you become a member of Women’s Running Plus right now, you can get your hands on your first issue of Women’s Running for just £1! Just enter WRSS22POD at the checkout.

Please support us on Patreon and you’ll get some lovely patron-only perks, including an exclusive newsletter from me and Holly! 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.