About me

I used to be one of those people who just couldn’t feel the love for running. No matter what I tried, I never got into it and I didn’t understand how people could be so fanatic about it. In fact, there was a time when I wasn’t into sports at all. The combination of never having received that necessary push at home and, to an even greater extent, my PE teacher all through secondary school being an awful person made me hate exercise for a long time. (Wonder what she’d say if she could see me now – I definitely proved her wrong!)

Luckily that changed when I went to university and discovered that sports can be fun, as long as you are joined by nice people and can focus on the things you enjoy doing. So I started going to the gym, went swimming, horse riding and took dance classes. I still didn’t warm to running at that stage, though.

When I turned 30 and life got in the way of most of the other sports I used to do, I decided to give it another go as running was fairly easy because you can just step outside your house and go. No excuses! I started off with a couch-to-5K. To my surprise, I found myself keeping up the 5K plod around the block three times a week.

Moving from Belgium to the UK was a massive change, I discovered a whole new world, meeting friends who were into running too, I joined Parkrun and in 2016 – age 34 – I ran my very first races: first a couple of 5Ks, then a 10K and in September 2016 I ran the Great North Run for the very first time.

Since then, things really took off. A friend introduced me to trail running and I discovered that’s really my thing. In 2018 my friend and I decided we were going to set ourselves a challenge every year. So, in 2018 we ran the Coast to Coast from Tynemouth (NE England) to Bowness-on-Solway (NW UK, Scotland) and in 2019 we ran from Newcastle to Edinburgh. On top of that, 2019 was also the year in which I ran my very first marathon (Kielder Marathon) after having completed my fair share of half marathons by that stage.

2020 and 2021 were difficult due to Covid and all the lockdowns, but my running buddy and I still managed to complete our Great Run South (to Robin Hood’s Bay) even though we had to spread it over two years rather than just the one. 2022 saw us completing the Tyne & Wear Heritage Way and 2023, St Oswald’s Way.

In addition to running I also like swimming and cycling, so I decided to slightly shift my focus to triathlon. I’ve taken swimming lessons to get better at swimming front crawl and try to go out on the bike whenever I can. Due to personal circumstances unfortunately I was unable to take part in the triathlon I had signed up for this summer but I was allowed to defer my place to next year so 2024 it is then!

Some quotes I find inspiring