{"id":2215,"date":"2014-07-15T17:04:13","date_gmt":"2014-07-15T17:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/club.runthrough.co.uk\/?p=2215"},"modified":"2021-07-16T03:26:31","modified_gmt":"2021-07-16T03:26:31","slug":"runthroughuk-hero-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/club.runthrough.co.uk\/runthroughuk-hero-month\/","title":{"rendered":"RunThrough’s Hero of the Month"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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This month’s RunThroughUK hero (our first ever!) is Juliet Bowen<\/a>. I’ll let her take it from here and I’m sure you’ll see why.<\/p>\n Juliet, why did you start running?<\/strong><\/p>\n So I started running 2 years ago, completely from scratch. And from scratch I mean with absolutely no fitness or stamina at all. I had been advised for a while by my doctors to take up some form of exercise and to eat more healthily. One day, after a particularly bad few weeks of illness I decided to take this advice and try to be the best and healthiest version of myself. It wasn’t going to cure me by any means, but I knew it would make me feel better. I suffer from various health problems which, without going into too much detail, are unfortunately very unpredictable. People find it hard to understand ‘invisible illnesses,’ because I look ‘ok’ people assume that I am. I have many days where I can’t even get out of bed, many days where I end up in A&E with excruciating pain or a collapse, but I also have days where I can run a half marathon! A lot of people find this hard to understand but my illness is so up and down that I have to take each day at a time, and assess each day what I think I am capable of. There are many days where I have to cancel a planned run or abandon a training session half way through but then I also successfully complete many runs and I love to do a lot of races when I can. Races give me something to aim for, targets and goals that motivate me and give me a sense of achievement and delight when I reach them. My first race was a 5k race<\/strong><\/a> for life.<\/p>\n