The Beginning of my Love for Running

 In this blog post I’m going to talk about how my love for running came about, as I definitely haven’t always been a runner. When planning to travel to Manchester for a city break with my friend Abby, I noticed that Gymshark were holding a run club event in Manchester, on the day after we arrived, perfect! The event was held by Anna Archer, and for those of you who don’t know her, she is a content creator who has gained popularity for her unique personality and engaging content and at the time of the event she was also a Gymshark athlete! The event was called Anna on the Run, Abby and I eagerly bought tickets and awaited the day. Neither of us were runners and neither of us had ran a 5k in our lives but the opportunity seemed like too much fun to pass down. 

 

After a late flight on Friday night and only a couple hours of sleep, our alarms went off at 6:30am on Saturday morning. Even though we were both exhausted, we got dressed and headed to meet Anna and the other runners at the meet-up point which was a bakery called Loaf MCR. When we arrived, Anna took a quick warm up and straight away calmed our nerves by explaining that we were there to have fun, and that it wasn’t a race! We got our group photo and began our 5k run around Manchester. Let’s just say running was NOT as fun as I thought! Two kilometres in and I felt as though I was running a marathon. Needless to say, we finished the 5k in thirty-six minutes and headed back to Loaf MCR for some coffee and cakes. The rest of the morning was spent chatting to girls with similar interests to myself, even though not a lot of us would consider ourselves runners, this running event brought us together. We had coffees and cakes and then chatted to Anna before heading back to our hotel. 

I loved this event! It made me realise that running isn’t about how far or how fast you go but more about how much fun you can have. Running is about socialising and moving your body to feel good mentally and physically. “The runners high” is often talked about within the running world, it describes the feeling of stress relief and the release of endorphins after completing a run which is exactly how this run made me feel. This was a feeling that I wanted to experience more off. This is when I decided that I should run more, which is exactly what I did. 

This event sparked my enthusiasm to begin running as it made me realise that running wasn’t about speed or distance. Of course, I wanted to improve my pace as I began to run more and more but I mostly enjoyed running for the social aspect. 

 

When I arrived back home I started to take running more seriously, it felt like I finally found a sport that I genuinely enjoyed (most of the time!). My dad, John is also an avid runner so having him by my side made it a lot easier to stick at. After a few months of running and my fitness improving, I knew it was time to follow my dads lead and sign up for my first 10k race! I’ll talk about this more in my blogs to follow. 

 

Thanks for reading my first blog and make sure to check back for more soon! 

 

Kirsty x