Three years ago I joined this forum to ask about moving on from week 1. Our running group of 8 unfit mums had agreed that we would not move on to the next week until we were all happy to do so. At that point, running for a minute with a 90 second walk seemed to be as much as we could manage. It did not seem to be getting any easier but slowly we each felt we needed to try week two. We were down to one remaining doubter having repeated week one five times when I sought advice from here.
Obviously in a group of 8 there were going to be different fitness levels and other factors that would affect our running. Our last remaining doubter was a recent ex-smoker and described herself as having more than enough body for each of her children to cuddle. It would be fair to say that she was one of those that found it the hardest. I admired her determination and at no time did she ever consider giving up. We changed our plan and would always give the next run a try and then go back a week if any one of us felt it was too hard. We never had to.
As we progressed through the weeks she was probably the one that saw the biggest change. As well as the running, we had realised that the meals we ate (or didn't eat) the day before affected how our runs went. We started to eat healthier and so the rest of our families did too.
We completed C25K and then covid hit, we were forced to run individually. We all seemed to pick different ways to continue. There was getting less and less of our friend for her children to cuddle and at one point we worked out that as a group, we had almost lost the equivalent weight of one person, our combined weigh was only about 7/8 of what it was when we started.
We have less group runs than we would like and rarely do all 8 of us make it out together. Our now very un-cuddly mum stuck to her steady pace and slowly increased the distance she ran. We never believed we would make it to 5K when we started and I would have laughed at anyone that said that I would soon be running a minimum of 5K every day.
Today our friend announced that on Sunday she managed a 25K run without stopping. We are all so please (and jealous) of her achievement. None of the rest of us are anywhere near that.
We are going to find a way to celebrate her achievement.
Jeffing with the Running Group 😊👍
Memories are made of these..... 🥰
Running clubs aren’t scary! 
