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 [...]

My gym has sporadic phone signal, so in between exercises, I spend a lot of time watching what people around me are doing. And I see a lot of people making the same mistakes. I don't mean mistakes like not putting their equipment away or wiping it down at the end of a session, though this [...]