Train with me for your first 5k I'm on maternity leave right now, which means that for the first time in several years, I'm not out in local parks coaching new runners to their first 5k. So I've come up with a plan - I'm going to help those who'd like to start running this [...]

Running and exercise during pregnancy: my experience Early this year I asked four women to share their experience of exercise during pregnancy. Unbeknownst to them, I was pregnant at the time. So it’s only fair that I share my own... I came into pregnancy with no expectations of how long I’d keep running for, but [...]

Your Running Goals For 2018 Have you thought about what you want to achieve next year? Runners are used to having a goal and a plan for getting there, so it's no surprise that as the calendar ticks over to another year, we might spend a little (or a lot of) time thinking about what [...]

How to pace a run: 3 ways to get it just right I've written before about why it's important to run your easy and long runs at the right pace - and how most runners are guilty of running these far too fast. And I'll keep banging on about it because there's huge benefits to [...]

See you in 2018 I'm now on maternity leave! It's been a whirlwind year and I'll now be (hopefully) taking a few weeks off before the next big event. I'm basically planning a pre-baby taper. I've got a few posts scheduled for the next few months, so look out for those - particularly if you're [...]

Are you a running perfectionist? We all know the saying: practice makes perfect. But what we often forget is the other part that's inherent in this statement - that practice itself ISN'T perfect. And yet we expect it to be. As runners, when we look at our training plan at the start of a training [...]

Building confidence along with fitness When I write a training plan for a runner, it will be made up of many of the familiar elements you'll have seen on your own: easy runs, long runs, tempo runs and intervals. Sessions organised neatly over the weeks, building towards a race, all with their own goals helping [...]

Telling people what they don't want to hear Part of being a good coach, in my view, involves telling people no. I write personalised training plans for runners, I provide week-by-week coaching, and I've coached runners in person. And sometimes I'm asked to make things happen that I just don't think are possible. A few [...]

So you want to run a marathon... I've helped a lot of runners tackle their first marathon over the years, and I know that it can be an exciting but also a confusing journey. You'll have a lot of people telling what you should and shouldn't do - from quitting running altogether because it's bad [...]