After our second child was born, I had put on a lot of weight and only had just stopped feeding my first child so was not feeling great about myself. I absolutely loved being a mother but recognised I needed to do something for myself.
My husband encouraged me to study something that he knew was of great interest to me, which was, and is, all matters relating to physical fitness.
Initially, I declined as I had other qualifications; I did not wish to work in a gym. However, the prospect of getting out of the house for two nights a week, leaving my husband to deal with our two small boys was an attractive incentive.
I had put on a lot of weight in my second pregnancy, so I was a little hesitant in attending that first lecture—filled, as it was, with fit young wannabe trainers. And yes, in that very first lecture they used me as an example, of a person carrying weight because of breast feeding! I could have shrivelled up, but instead it gave me the drive and motivation to get fit, really fit!
It was difficult to accommodate training, but I did manage to exercise during Course breaks. On one such occasion, whilst running around the block, two men in a car yelled, “Give it up, jig-along!” I could have given up, there and then. However, I refused to feel humiliated. Instead, this experience gave me an understanding of the vulnerability of women and fuelled my determination to help other women. By the conclusion of the Course, I outshone most others in fitness assessments, had lost all my excess weight and sent out my first flyers advertising “Her Time” recognising that women, particularly those with children needed some time to concentrate of themselves.
Two – four hours a person could spend exercising with other women could change their entire week, life.
Within two weeks of doing so, 40 women signed up. I was committed in my quest to empower women and through health and exercise. I was now equipped to achieve my goal and set about sharing my secret of success. The secret has now been spreading for many years.
I ran my first marathon in 2011, the Melbourne Marathon. My eldest son was six and youngest four. This was an absolute turning point in my life. Deciding to run a marathon changed my life in so many ways including changing the lives of many who I have trained and taken to numerous running events around the world. It has also changed the life of my family – my beautiful two children and my husband who have embraced our new life of healthy eating, early nights, active lifestyles.
Running 42.195 Kilometers…at first the task seemed extremely daunting, then straight forward, and then completely impossible. On and on I went, thinking about what I just signed myself up for. My running partner and I signed up for the Melbourne Marathon, we had a deadline and we made a commitment to each other that we were going to see this through.
In the beginning, I thought my journey would be simple. Just start running daily, build-up to the necessary distance and then run my Marathon. Simple, scratch one more thing off the bucket list. However, my life changed in ways that I never imagined.
Finding a running partner was critical to my success. We committed to our running sessions – mainly at 5am in the morning but as the kms got longer this did turn into earlier and earlier – perhaps the craziest one at 1am in the morning in rain! The success of this relationship was critical: we were always both on time, to the minute. If we said 5am we both would be ready at precisely that time, we never let each other down – over 9 years of running I would say that we have only cancelled on each other a handful of times, that we enjoyed each other’s company.
Making running a part of my life – turning it into a habit. It wasn’t difficult to get back into running as its been something that I constantly flirted with. But having something to work for, a goal that meant so much to me, really kept me motivated and involved long after I would have last stopped. We ran four to five times a week and very soon it became such a part of our life that it was something we could not do without. We were committed to each other, our goal and wrote down our plan of our running times and days, we were on our way!
There were certainly tough days. Days where I just wanted to revert back to my old ways: have a wine and hang out on the couch. But that ever-looming goal that I had in the back of my mind kept reminding me that I still had training to do. Slowly but surely, I didn’t have to remind myself to go running. It just became a habit.
At this time I was also training many other people at 6am every morning of the week, so I really had to run before these sessions as by the time I got home at 7am – I needed to return to being a mum for my boys, my husband needed to go to work, and as anyone that has children knows this is the hardest job in the world. I could not just go out and run and leave my children so running needed to be done at a time not to interrupt my family.
I quickly realized that drinking and running and raising children really don’t mix. It’s kind of hard to wake up for an early Sunday morning distance run when you’re hungover from the night before. I also wanted to be present in my children’s life – playing with them not lying hung over on a couch. In addition, after doing some research, I found that drinking alcohol reduced your body’s ability to recover from an intense run and your body’s ability to build muscle. So it became less appealing and I slowly phased drinking out of my way of life, it being a very occasional (twice a year, maybe) event for me.
Making running a part of my life had its drawbacks. As my life slowly adjusted to the demands of my goal, I fell out of touch with certain friends. My drinking buddies, for instance, started to miss me when I wasn’t able to make it out to the bar because I had a training run or a race the next morning. One of my friends once jokingly said to me “if we don’t have our drinking, what have we got?” I found that I was not invited to certain events as some people could not understand why I wasn’t drinking and perhaps found me boring. However, soon my habit of not drinking at social functions became the norm for myself and my friends too.
After running many marathons and half marathons (as a social runner, not a professional runner) running has now become a part of my identity. The more I ran, the more I talked about it with my friends and the more my friends associated me with it. It wasn’t long before I was known in some circles as a runner. Along with this, I’ve been able to inspire others to start making healthy decisions for themselves (whether that be from a physical or from a mental perspective).
There is a fine line for me as I also am an outdoor fitness trainer and lots of people don’t like running and with this perception of Anna and running I tread a fine line of losing clients. The outdoor fitness sessions are first and foremost based on variety and fun they are strength and cardio based – critical also to the success of running – the sessions compliment my clients who run but do not detract from those who don’t want to run.
While I do take a lot of pride in being a trainer and a runner, it also had its drawbacks. In some cases I found that I had such high expectations of myself that I couldn’t enjoy certain milestones in my training:
In 2008 I finished one of my first city to bays after just starting to run 52.28 – and sadly I thought I could have run better and couldn’t celebrate my success.
After 13 years of running, numerous injuries including fracturing my foot twice, and numerous hamstring and back problems, I have finally learnt to enjoy and celebrate all my runs – I now celebrate not all my Personal Bests (PB’s) but also my Happy Runs (HR’s). My happy runs are where I feel good throughout and finish with a smile on my face!
Perhaps my biggest lesson in running is the importance of sleep. After many years of getting up at stupid o’clock 4 -5 times per week, training others at 6am, 9am and 6pm and being a fulltime mother – my body finally shut down. Instead of losing weight, weight started to creep on and due to tiredness I was not making good food choices all of the time – grabbing for foods that gave me an instant pick me up. I soon realised that I could not continue this way – that at this stage I should have been at peak fitness, and I certainly wasn’t. After seeing numerous doctors who all claimed that I was fit as a fiddle I came to my own conclusion that I was terribly sleep deprived: this was the missing link in my fitness and health. I then cut back on my outdoor fitness training hours from twelve contact hours per week to five. I was back! My body niggles and pains subsided and I was able to train again and I felt fit and health once again.
My diet although on the whole I had a really good healthy diet. But after dealing with an auto immune disease, alopecia (loss of hair), I worked with a fabulous naturopath who really brought home to me how important our diet is. Everything we put in our mouth has a direct impact on how we look and feel each and every day. Up until now nothing had cured my alopecia – I saw numerous doctors including having steroids directly inject into the balding areas of my head.
I changed my diet with my naturopath eliminating sugars, dairy, caffeine and limiting meat. The effect was immediate, within ten days my hair started growing back. I then referred a number of my clients to the naturopath and the effects were incredible reaffirming that we are what we eat. Having a goal, training others and running means that my diet needs to be on track for me to feel good and operate to the best of my ability each and every day. I certainly notice it when it’s not.
Running marathons has certainly changed my life, and in many ways it has already changed the lives of many around me.
I love what I do training people in exercise, running and fitness. I see my core trade as essentially happiness. I assist people to find contentment less in how their body looks, but finding joy in its capacities and abilities. By encouraging clients to prioritise their own happiness, it encourages the prioritising of their own health and well-being. Benefits flow on, not just to individuals, but to their families and communities.
When one feels good about oneself—when one’s day includes physical challenges and successes—most tend to feel better about everything else. Happy, contented people smile and the world smiles back! In this context, exercise becomes joyful and the pleasure of achievement displaces any sense that exercising is a punishment for eating the wrong thing, carrying too much weight, or not looking as dictated by fashion. Instead, movement becomes a joy in itself; success breeds success, and goals quickly shift from appearance to achievement.
Running has changed my life in so many ways! Although I am a just a social runner I think I can proudly say “I Am A Runner”.
Have your own marathon story you want to share? We’d love to hear it. Use THIS LINK to tell us all about it.
