Spending a whole day at an Iyengar yoga workshop gave me an opportunity to reflect on what I was learning. Iyengar yoga Iyengar yoga focuses on precision and alignment in poses, and uses props, such as blocks, blankets and belts, to improve the understanding of the...
Today (18th October) is World Menopause Day. I've spent quite a bit of time on Twitter participating in an awareness raising campaign organised by Henpicked, a network for women over 40, using the hashtag #HotFlashMob. It's probably the first time I've used the words...
I've been running for over five years. Thanks to my half marathon challenge I've run 15 half marathons since turning 50 in 2013. After completing that challenge it felt like time to have a go at the full 26.2 mile distance. I've always felt ambivalent about the...
Today it is one year since I completed the slightly mad challenge of running 12 half marathons in 12 months. Here are my two sentence race reviews and ten things I've learned. September 2014 - Robin Hood Half Marathon, Nottingham “The one that nearly got away.” My...
I met Christine Heaton when I joined Holme Pierrepont Running Club five years ago. I soon realised that Christine was a fast runner. And it seemed she was getting faster. In 2015 at the age of 50 Christine ran a sub-20 minute parkrun (5 km), a time which placed her in...
In February this year the parkrun organisation reported that over 50s had run 2 million miles at UK parkruns in 2015. Their data show that parkrun is encouraging people over 50 to become more active, and it is helping people of all ages to start running. It was at...
Did your life change at 50? Karen Parkin started running shortly after her 50th birthday and says, “It’s the best thing I ever did.” The data from Sport England’s Active People Survey suggest that Karen is not alone in taking up running in her fifties. In the nine...
As a runner in my fifties, who hopes to carry on running into old age, what can I learn from women who have continued to run through their fifties, and into their sixties and seventies? There are very few women over 64 running in the UK. According to the latest Sport...
What motivates women runners over 50 to continue running? What impact has running had on their lives? What was it like to be a female endurance runner in the UK in the 1960s, 70s and 80s? How can we keep fit into old age? These are some of the questions that I hope to...