In this episode I speak to Anna McNuff. Again. This is a bit of an anniversary episode as Anna was our very first podcast guest in May 2020 – check that out in episode 1. I’d interviewed her then a few months previously at the National Running Show in person, when life was very, very different, when I didn’t even know how to spell coronavirus. And here she is after having quite an epic year. Not content with just surviving the pandemic and lockdown, she also decided to get pregnant, buy her first house, write a brilliant book, and have a baby at the same time. So she’s had rather a lot on. We have a chat about pregnancy, and what it was like being pregnant and giving birth during that oddest of years. She talks about her newest love, cold water swimming, and how that became one of the great positives of both lockdown and pregnancy. She also talks very frankly about postnatal pelvic health, and introduces the concept of dumb-bells for your down below. Yes, you heard that right. She also talks about her running during pregnancy, and after – and how, in both cases, she is sensibly listening to her body and carefully adapting her ambitions to ensure she nurtures and strengthens herself in the best possible way. But as you might expect, she cannot WAIT to get her trail shoes back on.

This episode is sponsored by Decathlon. Decathlon sells clothing and equipment for over 70 sports online and in 47 stores across the UK. Thanks to their in-house brands, such as road running brand Kiprun, they're able to create expertly designed products offering unbeatable value for money, making running accessible for everyone. And we know you love Decathlon too, because you awarded them Retailer of the Year in our Women’s Running Reader’s Choice 2020 awards. So pick up a pair of Decathlon shoes and run more this summer!

Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running, which is 35% off. That’s less than £2.95 a month! And for that you get our brilliant magazine, and you also get loads of money off the sorts of stuff you love, like fab kit, nutrition and class memberships. Enter WRPOD at the checkout for your brilliant discount. Come and join Women’s Running – we’d love to have you with us!

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Welcome to the 12th Women’s Running Workshop with me, Esther Newman, and Holly Taylor. It’s a fortnight, or thereabouts, off from our virtual Vitality 10K (and I believe there is still time to enter if you’d like to join us. And please DO join us, because we’ve been chivvying each other along as best we can, but nothing supports us as runners more than the knowledge that there’s loads of us everywhere all doing the same thing! So we talk about that, and about how our training has been going. We’ve both been trialling our newfangled pyramid session, and we both completely forgot to do the threshold session. Meanwhile, Holly’s been doing some actual cross training, and neither of us did our yoga. It’s a mixed bag, really. So we talk about all of that, we talk about tapering for the 10K and general preparations, and then I bring in the double whammy: first, that our beloved Bath Half has been cancelled, which was due to take place in September. And second that I’ve found a new half marathon for us to do in August. I’m excited! Holly is too (I think). We’re both going to sign up to that, although Holly is clearly more keen on doing the Colourburst run. And probably the one thing of value to come out of the whole chat is that I lecture her – quite rightly  – on proper hydration, as she’s a nightmare with it, and I have instructed her to purchase a hydration pack and practice practice practice. With a half marathon in August, it’s crucial that she doesn’t rely on a quick swig of water beforehand. And as I point out to her, lots of races at the moment ask runners to be self-supporting because of coronavirus restrictions, so without knowing the details of the race we’re entering, it’s worth investing in a hydration pack and practicing drinking while running now. Lecture over, it’s time for us to carry on wanging on about family camping trips, wild pooing, and cans of gin and tonic. Standard.

You should totally become a member of Women’s Running. For one thing, Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running, which is 35% off. That’s less than £2.95 a month! And for that you get our brilliant magazine, and you also get loads of money off the sorts of stuff you love, like lovely kit, nutrition and class memberships. And, more than that, you’ll be one of us, which is priceless. Enter WRPOD at at the checkout for your brilliant discount. Come and join Women’s Running – we’d love to have you with us!

If you’d like to run the Vitality 10k, you’ve still got time to sign up. It really is one of the most joyful, inclusive experiences, even as a virtual race. It only costs £19, you get a race bib number, and then a really nice medal after you’ve done it, and you can enter right up until 4pm on Friday 28th May. Please run with us, we need the mutual support! More half marathon training nonsense next time.

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In this episode I speak to Dr Juliet McGrattan. Juliet has written for Women’s Running for YEARS, lending her considerable medical expertise to our conversations about women’s physical and mental health. She’s basically our go-to expert on pretty much everything. She’s a doctor, as well as a writer, and is also a director of Fearless 261 here in the UK. She’s written two books – the latest of which, Run Well, is every runner’s complete guide to healthcare, from shin splints to menopause, it’s all in there. I decided I wanted to talk to Juliet about the menopause and periods and all things hormonal for this episode – although I could happily have talked to her about pretty much any medical concern under the sun. But because in our last episode, Holly and I were talking about periods a little bit, I thought it best to bring an expert in rather than rely on our own somewhat shaky knowledge. So in this episode, I ask Juliet about period health, and ask her to explain the period cycle from start to finish, and how we can perhaps train better depending on where we are. We talk a LOT about menopause (you have been warned) and my own personal worry, osteoporosis. We also talk about the things we can achieve as runners and women as we age, the red flags we should look out for in ourselves and others in terms of our reproductive health, and how we can better manage and care for our mental health as we hurdle over perimenopause and beyond.

You should totally become a member of Women’s Running. For one thing, Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running, which is 35% off. That’s less than £2.95 a month! And for that you get our brilliant magazine, and you also get loads of money off the sorts of stuff you love, like lovely kit, nutrition and class memberships. And, more than that, you’ll be one of us, which is priceless. Enter WRPOD at the checkout at for your brilliant discount. Come and join Women’s Running – we’d love to have you with us!

Get hold of Juliet’s brilliant books right here:

Run Well

Sorted: The Active Woman’s Guide to Health

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In episode 11 of our Women’s Running workshop, Holly and I are building up to our virtual Vitality 10K at the end of May. You join us in the middle of a heated debate about recycling – so you may want to gloss over that. I talk about my 20-mile run/walk that I completed the weekend before (spoiler: it was LOVELY) and show off my medal (tricky on a podcast), and Holly talks about her improved running since recovering from not-Covid. I then try to include a bit of structure into the remaining weeks before our 10K, with a couple of pick-and-mix training sessions. These two types of runs are a threshold run and a pyramid run. If you want to try them out during your training, here are the details. 

Briefly speaking, a threshold run is running a little bit faster, while a pyramid session is a bit more complex and a bit more fun, with some more resting bits. With a threshold, you want the meat of your run to be 80% of your highest perceived effort, although I find it hard to work out what that is precisely, so for Holly and I we’re just going to run a little bit faster in the middle of our weekly run. So if we’re running for 30 minutes in total, we’ll include a 15-20 minute section in the middle where we’re just going to be running a bit faster than we normally do. This is not Chariots of Fire.

With a pyramid run, you start with a little warm up of at least five minutes easy running. Then you alternate intervals of faster running with 60 seconds of easy running, climbing up and down a pyramid of intervals, starting with 30 seconds, then 45, 60, 75 and 90, before going back down to 75, 60, 45 and 30, each with 60 seconds easy running in between. This is almost GUARANTEED to make our 10K easier, and it sounds super fun, so I’m looking forward to it.

We then talk about calves of steel (Holly) and hamstrings of balsa wood (me), and how we both need one session a week of yoga or pilates to stretch out our poor overworked bodies.

We have a quick pop at men who just HAVE to overtake us on a run, and I remind Holly of the best advice I’ve heard this year, which is: don’t measure yourself by someone else’s ruler. I want us all to take that on board.

You should totally become a member of Women’s Running. For one thing, Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running, which is 35% off. That’s less than £2.95 a month! And for that you get our brilliant magazine, and you also get loads of money off the sorts of stuff you love, like lovely kit, nutrition and class memberships. And, more than that, you’ll be one of us, which is priceless. Enter WRPOD at the checkout for your brilliant discount. Come and join Women’s Running – we’d love to have you with us!

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In episode 37 of the Women’s Running podcast we’re talking about recovery with Linda Jaros, a breathing and wellness coach. Linda has been passionate about caring for athletes for her entire career – and that’s more than 30 years now. The thing that made me immediately warm to her was her statement that “we don’t run with just our legs”. It can be borderline dangerous if you seek professional help for a running issue, and they only focus on that one bit. Linda, as all the best professionals in running do, looks holistically at each of us, at our whole bodies. She talks, for instance, about the importance of good nutrition in our recovery, and also ways in which we can minimise stress and improve the quality of our sleep. She also explores concepts such as conscious breathing, and at the end of the podcast gives us a very simple technique that she uses as part of her focus on athlete recovery; a simple bit of breathwork that will help you relax, and to recover. If you’re sceptical about meditation, this is not what you might think – it’s a couple of minutes doing something very very simple, with an almost instantaneous calming and relaxing effect. Magic. Linda now works for Oofos, the recovery footwear company, whose ethos closely matches her own. She talks here about how recovery footwear such as this can help your body recover from training - and remember, if your body recovers efficiently, you will get fitter and stronger faster, and reduce your chances of injury. This podcast was a revelation to me: the box breath technique that she explains is incredibly relaxing, and she’s really made me think about what I wear on my feet and what I do after a run, which is possibly more important than what I do during a run! 

You should totally become a member of Women’s Running. For one thing, Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running, which is 35% off. That’s less than £2.95 a month! And for that you get our brilliant magazine, and you also get loads of money off the sorts of stuff you love, like lovely kit, nutrition and class memberships. And, more than that, you’ll be one of us, which is priceless. Enter WRPOD at the checkout for your brilliant discount. Come and join Women’s Running – we’d love to have you with us!

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Episode 36 of the Women’s Running podcast is our 10th Workshop. In this episode Holly and I are talking easy running. We have the virtual Vitality 10K at the end of May to train for, but after 2020 and also us training for our virtual half in March, I want us both to take this easy. We begin by talking about imposter syndrome, which it turns out both of us suffer from without explicitly mentioning it, in terms of team sports at school. And how our lacklustre performances at which have lead to us embracing a sport that focusses less on competition (if you don’t want it to). We also talk vaguely and ridiculously about covid testing, not doing our strength training, and the take aways that we have employed as a result of our hip strength training in episode 9 of the Women’s Running Workshop. We also talk about not taking that 10K distance for granted – so yes, while I don’t want us to bust a gut in training beforehand, everyone that’s doing the vitality 10K with us should be respectful of that distance. If, like us, you’re not doing a huge amount of training but still want to do it, then take it slowly and at a pace you’re comfortable with: this could mean walking the whole way, or parts of it – and it’s the perfect opportunity to catch up with a running buddy. But whatever you do, learn from my mistakes and don’t do it three times over and end up with a stress fracture. So there’s a bit of easy training advice on that 10K distance at the end, if you can bear to put up with Hol and I cackling about audiobooks that make us snot-cry while we run.

Please join us at the virtual vitality London 10,000 this May half term. You can walk, jog or run your 10K – time is not an issue. Go to vitalitylondon10000.co.uk to sign up, and if you choose Women’s Running as where you’ve heard about it, you’ll be entered into a competition to win a pair of New Balance shoes, too. 

Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running: honest, it’s better than anything anywhere else. Go to our Shop and enter WRPOD at the checkout to get a whopping 35% off. Come and join Women’s Running - we’d love to have you with us!

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Welcome to episode 35! This week I’m chatting to Bryony Gordon. Author, columnist, podcaster, founder of Mental Health Mates, underwear marathon runner and champion of body positivity, Bryony has always been firmly on our radar. I first met Bryony just over a year ago, before our first lockdown and the world tipped off its axis. We met as part of the Celebrate You crew, a bunch of women all running the Vitality 10,000 or the London Marathon with the ambition of encouraging more women to do the same, and to feel confident and empowered by their own bodies. Since launching Mental Health Mates a few years ago, Bryony also encouraged the event directors of the Vitality 10,000 to make mental health a focus of the run too, and last year we all ran the virtual Vitality 10,000 for our heads as well as our hearts. We’re about to do the same this May too – if you’d like to join us, there’s plenty of time to sign up here. It costs just £19 to enter, and for that you’ll get a beautiful medal and technical tee. You can run at any time in the May half term, and you’ll be part of our 10K community – it would be lovely to have you with us! Holly and I are doing it too, and we’ll be talking about our training in next week’s podcast, so listen in for that.

Bryony talks to me here about founding Mental Health Mates when she realised that that community didn’t exist already, and she talks frankly about her own mental health. She also talks about running, and changing the reason why she ran – for the gains, and not for the losses. She’s a joy and an inspiration. Enjoy.

Please join us at the virtual Vitality London 10,000 this May half term. Go here and sign up, and if you choose Women’s Running as where you’ve heard about it, you’ll be automatically entered into a competition to win a gorgeous pair of New Balance shoes, too. What’s not to love?

Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running. Go to Women’s Running and enter WRPOD at the checkout to get a whopping 35% off as well as access to loads of discounts and freebies. Happy running!

This episode sponsored by Decathlon Second Life. Second Life is a new sustainability initiative helping us to recycle, repair and reuse sports equipment. Decathlon wanted to reduce the number of products going to waste, so their team of expert technicians refurbish used products, such as bikes and treadmills, before offering them to you with the same guarantees and returns policy as a brand new product. Every product comes with a minimum 10% discount, meaning Second Life works for our planet and your pocket! Give a product a Second Life. 

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In this episode of the Women’s Running Workshop, Holly and I have something different for you. Ever since her first half marathon in 2020, Holly has complained that she’s had a little bit of a hip niggle, and knowing that hip injuries are frighteningly common in runners we thought we’d track down someone to help with that and dedicate this episode to hip injuries and hip strength for runners. So here we are chatting with Victoria Smith a physio who specialises in hips and hip strength for runners. Victoria is a runner herself, and also suffers from hip niggles, so she’s a bit of a find for us. She patiently listens to all our various running woes and then offers sage advice on the strength moves we need to do to combat the niggles, and also the things we need to do in our everyday lives to stop the pain in its tracks. Turns out we sit wrong, we walk wrong, we do EVERYTHING wrong, so this is little short of revelatory. What’s very wonderful about Victoria is that she is realistic; she understands that strength training is boring for runners, so she says that she’ll ask us to do them every single day on the understanding that if we do them three times a week, then we’re winning. I love that. Listen in to find out how to fix your hips.

If you want more advice from Victoria on any hip pain you might have, join her facebook group, @fixyourhips for helpful tips and advice on gluteal tendinopathy. And sign up to her healthy hips programme here.

This podcast is sponsored by Vega. Vega is a premium range of vegan protein and nutritional powders made from real fruit and veg. Discover the full range here.

Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running. Go here and enter WRPOD at the checkout to get a whopping 35% off. Come and join Women’s Running - we’d love to have you with us. Happy running!

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In this episode I speak to Mel Bound. This is the second time we’ve had Mel on the podcast, and there’s a very good reason for that. In recent weeks, we’ve launched the We Will campaign. We have been appalled at what feels like a recent rise in the harassment and heckling of women runners, and we got together to talk about that. And once we started talking about it, we realised that this wasn't recent at all: this is every woman's lived experience - always. At Women’s Running we had sent out a survey in January, and one of the questions asked how safe women felt when they ran, and 69% of them didn’t feel safe. 69%. We asked them more questions about the experiences that made them not feel safe, and there was a catalogue of horrible things: heckling, shouting, body shaming, following, stalking, waiting, threatening, spitting, hitting, groping. No matter what the experience was, these women felt real danger and real fear. Crucially, for some of them, it stopped them from running altogether. So we want to do something about that, and part of what we’re doing is launching We Will, in which we’re asking for everyone – men and women – to pledge small changes that will have a combined bigger impact. We want women to tell their stories, we want to educate our young men, and we want to challenge the status quo, and we want to run without fear. I speak to Mel here about all of this, our own experiences, and how we’d like you to help.

Find out more about We Will, follow us on Instagram and please pledge what you’ll do to help women run without fear.

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So Holly and I have made it past the half marathon date – and this is our debrief. Did we succeed? And, actually and more importantly, what did success mean to both of us? It turns out we both wanted very different things from our half marathon experiences, and we had very different runs. We talk about what we had hoped for, and what actually transpired, and how the differences between those two things have coloured our opinions of ourselves and of our running.. For me, it has challenged everything I thought about me and running, and it has set me on a new path. For Holly, I think that this experience has given her the confidence to not only run and race again, but to appreciate her body’s strength and what it has enabled her to do. So what are our plans now? Well, we’ve got a 10K booked in in May and, as I keep on forgetting, a real-life half marathon in September, so there’s definitely enough to keep us going. Meanwhile I’ve got the London Marathon still in my sights in October, and I’ve nudged another little race in there in the meantime.

Next episode we have a treat, we’re going to be talking to a physio about hip injuries in runners, as Holly has been suffering from hers. Victoria Smith is a hip and knee specialist physio in the NHS, and she’ll be talking to us about how we prevent hip injuries, how we manage it if we damage ourselves, and how to recover fully afterwards. Holly can’t wait.

 
This podcast is sponsored by Vega. Founded by a vegan former professional triathlete, Vega is a premium range of vegan protein & nutritional powders made from real fruit and veg ingredients. They’re full of the things your body needs, so you can thrive each and every day, leading an active lifestyle without skipping a vitamin, mineral or a beat. Protein helps build and maintain muscles. Add to smoothies, shakes and bakes and enjoy as part of a healthy lifestyle and balanced diet. Go to www.myvega.co.uk to discover the full range.

Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running: honest, it’s better than anything anywhere else. Go here and enter WRPOD at the checkout to get a whopping 35% off as well as access to loads of discounts and freebies. Come and join Women’s Running - we’d love to have you with us. Happy running!

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