Meet LuanI'm a middle-aged Mum with a penchant for outdoor sports. I live in Stourport on Severn with my extremely tolerant Husband and our fun-loving young daughter. To keep me out of trouble, I work as a self-employed Personal Trainer. I try to fit my running training in and around my working week in order to minimise the effect it has upon my family - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't!
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My Running HistoryWow- how long have you got? It's a long and weird tale which I'm happy to tell over a drink of something warming in a pub some time. Meantimes, suffice it to know that I ran quite competently whilst at school but suffered an injury which curtailed my competition long enough for me to lose interest all the way into my twenties! I would run occasionally, doing a couple of sociable miles with friends but nothing serious... and that petered to almost nothing in my mid-twenties. The only exercise I was getting was a couple of hours of badminton per week. In my late twenties, I started to do some circuit training and gym-work, and to run again - just a few miles here and there, and started to get a feel for competing again. A couple of years of running local fun-runs and the likes led to higher targets, and in 2002 ( 6 years after finding my way back into running) I decided to apply for the 2003 London Marathon. I didn't get in, but opted to run the Shakespeare Marathon the following April instead. I hated it! It hurt, I felt awful, it was a ridiculously long way. I vowed to never ever run another marathon... I was hooked! A knee injury incurred playing badminton scuppered my 2004 season but I was back at Stratford in 2005. I hated it again! Seriously - I questioned why the heck I was doing it. I vowed that I was done with marathon distance... but I knocked about 20 minutes off my previous time and so decided to try an Autumn marathon the same year to improve my time... and so it went on... still hating the distance but loving the challenge. In 2013 I decided that 10 years was enough, so opted to run London that year as my farewell Marathon (by now, I was qualifying for London as a Good For Age participant, so no need to go through the ballot). I took my foot off the pedal for that run and enjoyed the journey - too much! The Bournemouth Marathon followed in October 2013 and then, on a whim, I signed up for the Jurassic Coast Challenge - 3 hard trail marathons on 3 consecutive days running along the Dorset Coast from Charmouth to Studland Bay in March 2014. I was back in love with the sport but in a totally different way - I loved the trails and the longer race times/distances suited me better. An Ultra-Runner was born. The Joust 24 hour race followed... and was repeated in 2015... then 2016 saw me take on numerous challenges at all sorts of crazy distances... and the crazy train ploughed on into 2017 with me side-stepping into obstacle course racing and rounding out the year with a double-marathon in the Sahara Desert. 2018 will see my first attempts at Triathlon, including Ironman!!!
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