Today’s guest post is from renowned running coach Julia Jones. A woman with whom those of you who can’t live without our Two Fit Chicks podcast are already familiar. After training thousands of women in Italy in her running clinics, she’s taking her message to the streets internet. Julia has teamed up with my podcast partner Shauna Reid of Dietgirl fame to create Up & Running a kickass online running clinic for women.
Their first course, the eight-week 5K Beginners Course – starts on Monday 21 March (woo hoo! The first day of spring!) & if you want to shake up your fitness routine this spring I urge you to check the course details /Julia’s amazing coaching expertise at upandrunningonline.org.
Shauna & Julia have saved a place on the 5K course for one MizFit reader. You can be from anywhere in the world, but you need to be female (there are plans for male-courses in the works).
Comment below for your chance to win and please to answer this question: If you could run for miles and miles and miles without ever getting tired, where would you run to today?
I’ve been offering women’s running clinics in Italy for over twelve years.
When I first started I used to give the ladies a questionnaire to fill out at the end of the eight weeks.
I wanted to know what prompted them to sign up for group running lessons. Most of all I wanted to know what, in the end, they felt they had gotten out of the two months together.
I tabulated all the answers and comments for a few years and then stopped.
Why? Because the answers, year after year, were always the same.
It was clear this was how it would always be. What I found most interesting is that they signed up for one thing, but came away with so much more.
The number ONE reason women come to a running clinic was to lose weight.
It could be 5 pounds or 50 pounds, but somewhere out there they’d heard that running burns more calories than any other activity and they wanted this weight off NOW.
Some of them went so far as trying calculate how many calories they’d burned and matched that to how much they ate – a dangerous and futile practice. Of course there were other answers like wanting to try running or run a marathon some day, but weight loss was always at the top of the list.
The funny thing is that after eight weeks they weren’t thinking about the scale anymore.
What’s kept me holding running clinics year after year was the Number One answer they gave me about what they got from the running clinic: They felt “happier”.
Sometimes it was a generic answer, other times they would write me long poetic prose about their experience.
They had set a goal for themselves and had obtained it. Happy.
They felt proud for having finally stuck with something for more than a week. Happy.
They were running and they never ever dreamed that they could actually run. Triple happy!
The only regret any of them ever had was that they had wasted so many months or years wanting to start a running program to only talk themselves out of it for whatever reason. And you know what? In the end, some of them did end up losing a few pounds, but it was no longer the main reason they continued with their running.
It had become so much more.
(winner announced 3.7.11)
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