A Beginner's Guide to Running

Featuring horrible PE Lessons in the 1980s and a painful walk down memory lane...

September is one of the times of year when my running club, Run Verity, beginner’s course starts again and we welcome in a whole new wave of people and try to make them love running the way we love running. Over the years, not least in part because of my own journey in to running, I’ve come to understand that the running itself is only a small part of this process. Often what’s also needed is to breakdown the narratives we hold about ourselves and exercise, particularly running, and try to write a new one, for ourselves. And hey, that is not easy, especially I feel (well, I probably would wouldn’t I?) for my generation, brought up with frequent and compulsory PE lessons which, if memory serves me well, mainly consisted of enough weekly torment to turn even the most enthusiastic child into a staunch advocate for sedentary living and a well-honed 20 a day smoking habit…

I can still feel the burning humiliation from the barbaric ritual of choosing teams, like some cruel social experiment from Lord of the Flies of who were the chosen “sporty ones”, this peek into the social behaviour of superiority could set the cast for a lifetime of deep-rooted insecurities.

I soon learnt that to survive this ritual, I had to be cunning and creative, devising new imaginary ways to “bunk off” lessons, forging parental signatures, faking illness, and diseases that I couldn’t even pronounce; this was no mean feat as my mother was the school nurse with a well-known presence in the school corridors and staff common room.

I persevered with grit and determination (which, ironically, would be a useful skill in my later running career) to play truant from the weekly PE lessons. There was no interrogation from the PE department of why I continued to be absent so I slunk off each week, and instead worked on finely tuning the skill of smoking as many cigarettes as I could in 90 minutes.

I now realise that my PE teachers probably didn’t really care about whether I attended or not, in fact I think they passively encouraged my absence, supporting our mutual hypothesis that I just wasn’t “sporty”. So how did I turn this around, how did I make a living from being “sporty”? Well, I’d supported my dad, who was a runner, at local races, and I enjoyed the atmosphere, the buzz, and the camaraderie of all the runners; I was curious, could I become a runner to?

I’d tried running before, but I would get to the end of the road and give up. I didn’t warm up, would head out at breakneck speed to soon turn around, defeated and deflated because I just couldn’t do it. Maybe the PE teachers were right, and I just wasn’t sporty. But there was just something inside me that wouldn’t give up- I wanted to be part of the running community that I had admired from afar for so long. 

We were away one Christmas in France with my parents and I joined Dad on one of his run. I tried to keep up with him but the familiarity of feeling as though hot pokers had been shoved down my throat soon took over, but Dad nonchalantly said “Slow down, take a walk break, then go again. Even if you think you can walk quicker, by running slower, you’re still mimicking running and you’ll be able to breathe”

I’d never been told this before, in PE it had always been run as fast as you can until you can’t run anymore and if you’d just started running, that was about 10 yards!And something amazing happened- I could breathe, I was doing it, I was actually doing it.  I felt strong and invincible, was this it, was I a runner? Could I be a runner?

Soon the lampposts grew further apart, the walking decreased, and the running increased. It took time, it didn’t happen overnight but I’m really glad I took the plunge and just tried because 20 odd years later it still makes me feel good about myself.

As a running coach I am asked this simple question time and time again- “how do I start running?”. Aside from the advice my Dad gave me, here are the top tips I always tell my new runners:

1. Find your why? - Why do you want to run? It could be to lose weight, make friends, feel good about yourself or because you want to see if you can. Whatever your reasons, write them down, it helps to remember when it’s hard to get out of the front door.

2. Nobody is watching - Trust me, nobody is watching you. We think they are, and we think we are being judged, and it’s a real psychological concept (I wrote about it just last week actually) called “The Imaginary Audience”. Sometimes, especially when we step out of our comfort zone, these thoughts can prevent us from doing things that we might actually enjoy. And it’s hard to let these thoughts go but, in my experience, other people are thinking about their own problems, issues or what they’re cooking for tea that evening. Try to remember a time before your imaginary audience showed up, hold onto this feeling, it’s quite liberating.

3. Try to remember that physical feeling of freedom - put your trainers on and walk out of the door, set yourself a small goal of run/walk between lamp posts, 10 mins is more than enough to start off with.

4. Slow it down - Another myth that surrounds running is that you must be fast to be a runner. No, you don't, in fact most runs should be run at a comfortable, talking pace; this is your pace. If you can't talk, slow it down even more, as long as one foot is off the ground at any one time you are running.

5. It's ok to walk - I am giving you permission to walk, everyone must start somewhere, and walking is the right thing to do when you first start running. Now read that again.

6. Breath through your mouth - it's bigger than your nose airways so get the air in and out through the bigger airway of the mouth.

7. Relax - hold your head up high, nobody knows if you've just finished a 20-mile run or a 10 min run/walk, you’re running so you are a runner.