The Women's Running Podcast

In this episode I speak to Catherine Foster. Now, not many of you will know who Catherine is, but I bet a million quid that LOADS of you have enjoyed running in her race. Catherine works for the Great Run Company, and the flagship event that they organise is the biggest half marathon in the world, the Great North Run.Pre-lockdown, I think a great deal of us took running events for granted – they were a fixture on our calendars, and something to look forward to and to motivate us. It never occurred to us how it might feel if they were taken away. Catherine talks to me here about how it felt from the other side of things: the uncertainty of the pandemic, the real struggle to keep the company going and to motivate the thousands of runners it supports. And events aren’t purely about us runners: events such as the Great North Run are vital in supporting charities through fundraising, and through supporting local businesses. So we chat about all of that, what Covid has done and how it’s changed the face of events forever. And we also talk about the launch of mass events too – the Great North Run was started up 40 years ago by Catherine’s dad, the legendary runner Brendan Foster. So running is literally in her blood, and her passion for the races they organise, the runners who do them, and the wider community is huge and palpable. Be inspired and listen in…Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running, which is 35% off. That’s less than £2.95 a month! And for that you get our brilliant magazine, and you also get loads of money off the sorts of stuff you love, like kit, nutrition and class memberships. Enter WRPOD at the checkout for your discount. Come and join Women’s Running – we’d love to have you with us!Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=67575412) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to episode 44 of the Women’s Running Podcast and our 14th workshop. This episode is our virtual Vitality 10K debrief: we’ve got a LOT to unpack here. We talk about our 10K, and annoyingly listening back to this I say that we “failed”. We didn’t fail, we did the damn thing, but we didn’t do what we promised ourselves we would do. So we chat about that and tactics to avoid lying to ourselves in the future. The big discussion point here is that we’ve got a half marathon coming up on 15th August and we need to give ourselves a big talking to, and we need to prep properly for what will be a warm race. So I introduce training using heart rates: specifically training in zone 2 of our heart rates. And this makes us both feel better, because – basically – it sounds easier, but clever science means it’ll make us better runners! Hurrah! Here’s the science bit. The common calculation used to determine your maximum heart rate (MHR) is 220 minus your age. So a 35-year-old runner would have a MHR of 185. A more recent equation is [208 – (0.7 x age)]. For a 35-year-old runner, this works out as 183.5.Once you have your maximum heart rate, you can use this to determine the training zones you should be trying to stay within on your runs. ●     Zone 1: Very light, 50% to 60% of MHR - Recovery runs●     Zone 2: Light, 60% to 70% of MHR - Easy runs●     Zone 3: Moderate, 70% to 80% of MHR - Longer tempo runs●     Zone 4: Hard, 80% to 90% of MHR - Interval training●     Zone 5: Very hard, 90% to 100% of MHR - Very short intervalsA well-rounded training programme should see runners working in all training zones at different points in their week, but with the majority of their training done in zones 1 and 2. Zone 2 runs use predominantly slow twitch muscle fibres whereas a faster run will start to use fast twitch fibres. Slow twitch muscle fibres are full of mitochondria (your cell power banks) and capillaries, this means that the muscle gets a better blood flow and with training becomes more efficient at using this extra oxygen supply as energy. Plus it reduces chances of injury. A fitness tracker or smart watch should help you immeasurably here, if you have one. Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running, which is 35% off. That’s less than £2.95 a month! And for that you get our brilliant magazine, and you also get loads of money off the sorts of stuff you love, like lovely kit, nutrition and class memberships. Enter WRPOD at the checkout for your discount. Come and join Women’s Running – we’d love to have you with us!Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=67575412) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode I speak to Becca Burns, otherwise known as This Bunny Runs. Becca is an ASICS FrontRunner and an all-round running ambassador. I first met Becca way back in 2019 at RunFit in Liverpool, but everything has changed since then – including all the things she loves. Back then she was an ardent road runner, and was just about to take on the Liverpool marathon. Shortly after I spoke to her there, however, she made the move into diversifying her sporting loves, embracing both trail running and triathlon with her trademark enthusiasm. She talks to me here about her giant bunny, and how she fell in love with running twice. She talks about how her motivations have changed, how she got into cycling and then into triathlon, and she discusses her nail-biting attempt to nab a sub-4hr marathon time. She also tells me how she made the move from road to trail – I love her quote here: “if you think running is good, trail is next level”. I also ask her to persuade me – the coldest woman in the world™ – to take up cold water swimming, something that so far eludes me. Apparently it’s all about the hot chocolate afterwards. What Becca does best is to joyfully celebrate what her body is capable of, and in turn encourage us to do the same. What an awesome woman. You should totally become a member of Women’s Running. For one thing, Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running, which is 35% off. That’s less than £2.95 a month! And for that you get our brilliant magazine, and you also get loads of money off the sorts of stuff you love, like lovely kit, nutrition and class memberships. And, more than that, you’ll be one of us, which is priceless. Enter WRPOD at the checkout for your brilliant discount. Come and join Women’s Running – we’d love to have you with us!Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=67575412) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is our 13th workshop, and in this one Holly and I talk about one of our favourite subjects: running kit! I wanted to chat about what we’re going to be wearing for the virtual Vitality 10K, and in the course of that discussion just chat about our favourite bits and pieces, and what we’re going to be investing in next. We’ve both learned so much over the last few years in terms of the kit and shoes that work for us – in a surprise move even for her, Holly comes out and confesses that she actually needs support shoes, only just realising that she’s been running in that type for the past year. Both of us talk about running in old favourites, so while I’ve added everything here that we’re running in that I can – some of them are things we’ve been running in for ages, so the links are to newer things and not the exact items that we have now. I can’t eulogise enough about my Brooks top, which is ancient, but everything about it – the softness, the arm length, the collar - is aces. However we’re going to be running in the sun unexpectedly this week, so I may need a rethink on the top front. We also talk – at length, this is us after all – about how running pants are now a thing, and more important than you might think. We discuss the true evil of the cotton knicker (Holly has the scars to show for why running in those is not a good idea). And we chat about running commando, which neither of us have ever done, neither of us like the sound of, and both of us revert to children in this part of the discussion, rather than the mature adults we’re supposed to be.  You should totally become a member of Women’s Running. For one thing, Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running, which is 35% off. That’s less than £2.95 a month! And for that you get our brilliant magazine, and you also get loads of money off the sorts of stuff you love, like lovely kit, nutrition and class memberships. And, more than that, you’ll be one of us, which is priceless. Enter WRPOD at at the checkout for your brilliant discount. Come and join Women’s Running – we’d love to have you with us! The kit we mentioned here are:Saucony Endorphin SpeedSuperfeet inner soles10L Hydration packPrecision HydrationBP3 pantsRunderwear braBrooks Adrenalin GTS 21Decathlon running leggings(And they are made with 87% recycled polyester as I suspected!)Kalenji Run Dry T-shirtHydration packMaaree BraSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=67575412) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode I speak to Anna McNuff. Again. This is a bit of an anniversary episode as Anna was our very first podcast guest in May 2020 – check that out in episode 1. I’d interviewed her then a few months previously at the National Running Show in person, when life was very, very different, when I didn’t even know how to spell coronavirus. And here she is after having quite an epic year. Not content with just surviving the pandemic and lockdown, she also decided to get pregnant, buy her first house, write a brilliant book, and have a baby at the same time. So she’s had rather a lot on. We have a chat about pregnancy, and what it was like being pregnant and giving birth during that oddest of years. She talks about her newest love, cold water swimming, and how that became one of the great positives of both lockdown and pregnancy. She also talks very frankly about postnatal pelvic health, and introduces the concept of dumb-bells for your down below. Yes, you heard that right. She also talks about her running during pregnancy, and after – and how, in both cases, she is sensibly listening to her body and carefully adapting her ambitions to ensure she nurtures and strengthens herself in the best possible way. But as you might expect, she cannot WAIT to get her trail shoes back on.This episode is sponsored by Decathlon. Decathlon sells clothing and equipment for over 70 sports online and in 47 stores across the UK. Thanks to their in-house brands, such as road running brand Kiprun, they're able to create expertly designed products offering unbeatable value for money, making running accessible for everyone. And we know you love Decathlon too, because you awarded them Retailer of the Year in our Women’s Running Reader’s Choice 2020 awards. So pick up a pair of Decathlon shoes and run more this summer!Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running, which is 35% off. That’s less than £2.95 a month! And for that you get our brilliant magazine, and you also get loads of money off the sorts of stuff you love, like fab kit, nutrition and class memberships. Enter WRPOD at the checkout for your brilliant discount. Come and join Women’s Running – we’d love to have you with us!Decathlon Decathlon is sponsoring this episode of the Women's Running podcastSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=67575412) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the 12th Women’s Running Workshop with me, Esther Newman, and Holly Taylor. It’s a fortnight, or thereabouts, off from our virtual Vitality 10K (and I believe there is still time to enter if you’d like to join us. And please DO join us, because we’ve been chivvying each other along as best we can, but nothing supports us as runners more than the knowledge that there’s loads of us everywhere all doing the same thing! So we talk about that, and about how our training has been going. We’ve both been trialling our newfangled pyramid session, and we both completely forgot to do the threshold session. Meanwhile, Holly’s been doing some actual cross training, and neither of us did our yoga. It’s a mixed bag, really. So we talk about all of that, we talk about tapering for the 10K and general preparations, and then I bring in the double whammy: first, that our beloved Bath Half has been cancelled, which was due to take place in September. And second that I’ve found a new half marathon for us to do in August. I’m excited! Holly is too (I think). We’re both going to sign up to that, although Holly is clearly more keen on doing the Colourburst run. And probably the one thing of value to come out of the whole chat is that I lecture her – quite rightly  – on proper hydration, as she’s a nightmare with it, and I have instructed her to purchase a hydration pack and practice practice practice. With a half marathon in August, it’s crucial that she doesn’t rely on a quick swig of water beforehand. And as I point out to her, lots of races at the moment ask runners to be self-supporting because of coronavirus restrictions, so without knowing the details of the race we’re entering, it’s worth investing in a hydration pack and practicing drinking while running now. Lecture over, it’s time for us to carry on wanging on about family camping trips, wild pooing, and cans of gin and tonic. Standard.You should totally become a member of Women’s Running. For one thing, Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running, which is 35% off. That’s less than £2.95 a month! And for that you get our brilliant magazine, and you also get loads of money off the sorts of stuff you love, like lovely kit, nutrition and class memberships. And, more than that, you’ll be one of us, which is priceless. Enter WRPOD at at the checkout for your brilliant discount. Come and join Women’s Running – we’d love to have you with us!If you’d like to run the Vitality 10k, you’ve still got time to sign up. It really is one of the most joyful, inclusive experiences, even as a virtual race. It only costs £19, you get a race bib number, and then a really nice medal after you’ve done it, and you can enter right up until 4pm on Friday 28th May. Please run with us, we need the mutual support! More half marathon training nonsense next time.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=67575412) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode I speak to Dr Juliet McGrattan. Juliet has written for Women’s Running for YEARS, lending her considerable medical expertise to our conversations about women’s physical and mental health. She’s basically our go-to expert on pretty much everything. She’s a doctor, as well as a writer, and is also a director of Fearless 261 here in the UK. She’s written two books – the latest of which, Run Well, is every runner’s complete guide to healthcare, from shin splints to menopause, it’s all in there. I decided I wanted to talk to Juliet about the menopause and periods and all things hormonal for this episode – although I could happily have talked to her about pretty much any medical concern under the sun. But because in our last episode, Holly and I were talking about periods a little bit, I thought it best to bring an expert in rather than rely on our own somewhat shaky knowledge. So in this episode, I ask Juliet about period health, and ask her to explain the period cycle from start to finish, and how we can perhaps train better depending on where we are. We talk a LOT about menopause (you have been warned) and my own personal worry, osteoporosis. We also talk about the things we can achieve as runners and women as we age, the red flags we should look out for in ourselves and others in terms of our reproductive health, and how we can better manage and care for our mental health as we hurdle over perimenopause and beyond.You should totally become a member of Women’s Running. For one thing, Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running, which is 35% off. That’s less than £2.95 a month! And for that you get our brilliant magazine, and you also get loads of money off the sorts of stuff you love, like lovely kit, nutrition and class memberships. And, more than that, you’ll be one of us, which is priceless. Enter WRPOD at the checkout at for your brilliant discount. Come and join Women’s Running – we’d love to have you with us!Get hold of Juliet’s brilliant books right here:Run WellSorted: The Active Woman’s Guide to HealthSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=67575412) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode 11 of our Women’s Running workshop, Holly and I are building up to our virtual Vitality 10K at the end of May. You join us in the middle of a heated debate about recycling – so you may want to gloss over that. I talk about my 20-mile run/walk that I completed the weekend before (spoiler: it was LOVELY) and show off my medal (tricky on a podcast), and Holly talks about her improved running since recovering from not-Covid. I then try to include a bit of structure into the remaining weeks before our 10K, with a couple of pick-and-mix training sessions. These two types of runs are a threshold run and a pyramid run. If you want to try them out during your training, here are the details. Briefly speaking, a threshold run is running a little bit faster, while a pyramid session is a bit more complex and a bit more fun, with some more resting bits. With a threshold, you want the meat of your run to be 80% of your highest perceived effort, although I find it hard to work out what that is precisely, so for Holly and I we’re just going to run a little bit faster in the middle of our weekly run. So if we’re running for 30 minutes in total, we’ll include a 15-20 minute section in the middle where we’re just going to be running a bit faster than we normally do. This is not Chariots of Fire.With a pyramid run, you start with a little warm up of at least five minutes easy running. Then you alternate intervals of faster running with 60 seconds of easy running, climbing up and down a pyramid of intervals, starting with 30 seconds, then 45, 60, 75 and 90, before going back down to 75, 60, 45 and 30, each with 60 seconds easy running in between. This is almost GUARANTEED to make our 10K easier, and it sounds super fun, so I’m looking forward to it.We then talk about calves of steel (Holly) and hamstrings of balsa wood (me), and how we both need one session a week of yoga or pilates to stretch out our poor overworked bodies.We have a quick pop at men who just HAVE to overtake us on a run, and I remind Holly of the best advice I’ve heard this year, which is: don’t measure yourself by someone else’s ruler. I want us all to take that on board. You should totally become a member of Women’s Running. For one thing, Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running, which is 35% off. That’s less than £2.95 a month! And for that you get our brilliant magazine, and you also get loads of money off the sorts of stuff you love, like lovely kit, nutrition and class memberships. And, more than that, you’ll be one of us, which is priceless. Enter WRPOD at the checkout for your brilliant discount. Come and join Women’s Running – we’d love to have you with us!Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=67575412) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode 37 of the Women’s Running podcast we’re talking about recovery with Linda Jaros, a breathing and wellness coach. Linda has been passionate about caring for athletes for her entire career – and that’s more than 30 years now. The thing that made me immediately warm to her was her statement that “we don’t run with just our legs”. It can be borderline dangerous if you seek professional help for a running issue, and they only focus on that one bit. Linda, as all the best professionals in running do, looks holistically at each of us, at our whole bodies. She talks, for instance, about the importance of good nutrition in our recovery, and also ways in which we can minimise stress and improve the quality of our sleep. She also explores concepts such as conscious breathing, and at the end of the podcast gives us a very simple technique that she uses as part of her focus on athlete recovery; a simple bit of breathwork that will help you relax, and to recover. If you’re sceptical about meditation, this is not what you might think – it’s a couple of minutes doing something very very simple, with an almost instantaneous calming and relaxing effect. Magic. Linda now works for Oofos, the recovery footwear company, whose ethos closely matches her own. She talks here about how recovery footwear such as this can help your body recover from training - and remember, if your body recovers efficiently, you will get fitter and stronger faster, and reduce your chances of injury. This podcast was a revelation to me: the box breath technique that she explains is incredibly relaxing, and she’s really made me think about what I wear on my feet and what I do after a run, which is possibly more important than what I do during a run! You should totally become a member of Women’s Running. For one thing, Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running, which is 35% off. That’s less than £2.95 a month! And for that you get our brilliant magazine, and you also get loads of money off the sorts of stuff you love, like lovely kit, nutrition and class memberships. And, more than that, you’ll be one of us, which is priceless. Enter WRPOD at the checkout for your brilliant discount. Come and join Women’s Running – we’d love to have you with us!Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=67575412) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 36 of the Women’s Running podcast is our 10th Workshop. In this episode Holly and I are talking easy running. We have the virtual Vitality 10K at the end of May to train for, but after 2020 and also us training for our virtual half in March, I want us both to take this easy. We begin by talking about imposter syndrome, which it turns out both of us suffer from without explicitly mentioning it, in terms of team sports at school. And how our lacklustre performances at which have lead to us embracing a sport that focusses less on competition (if you don’t want it to). We also talk vaguely and ridiculously about covid testing, not doing our strength training, and the take aways that we have employed as a result of our hip strength training in episode 9 of the Women’s Running Workshop. We also talk about not taking that 10K distance for granted – so yes, while I don’t want us to bust a gut in training beforehand, everyone that’s doing the vitality 10K with us should be respectful of that distance. If, like us, you’re not doing a huge amount of training but still want to do it, then take it slowly and at a pace you’re comfortable with: this could mean walking the whole way, or parts of it – and it’s the perfect opportunity to catch up with a running buddy. But whatever you do, learn from my mistakes and don’t do it three times over and end up with a stress fracture. So there’s a bit of easy training advice on that 10K distance at the end, if you can bear to put up with Hol and I cackling about audiobooks that make us snot-cry while we run.Please join us at the virtual vitality London 10,000 this May half term. You can walk, jog or run your 10K – time is not an issue. Go to vitalitylondon10000.co.uk to sign up, and if you choose Women’s Running as where you’ve heard about it, you’ll be entered into a competition to win a pair of New Balance shoes, too. Podcast listeners can claim the best discount we have for membership to Women’s Running: honest, it’s better than anything anywhere else. Go to our Shop and enter WRPOD at the checkout to get a whopping 35% off. Come and join Women’s Running - we’d love to have you with us!Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=67575412) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.