Hi sports enthusiast … or curious family member or friend!
My name is Julie. I am a 22 year-old student who lives in Ghent and I’ve been running consistently for almost a year now. Jumping on the running bandwagon, however, wasn’t an obvious choice for me.
My story starts as it does for most people: when I was just a little kid. Now I don’t have any cute childhood stories of three year old me racing fellow toddlers. Instead, I was the kid who was forced – very much against her will – to take part in school races and performed miserably at them. Seriously, I have two participation medals and my best performance was ending second-to-last. To make that worse: my mom said she was ‘proud of me’.
After those two major disappointments, I looked for ways to avoid having to attend those events and managed to escape running until I started high school. There, it was the same old story all over again only this time we didn’t have school races that involved placements. So there was that. It wasn’t until I reached the age of 16 that I started taking running seriously. I was dealing with some personal issues when I started out and running helped me cope with them. I had a love/hate-relationship with it though: it made me feel glorious on good days but more often than I’d like to admit, it also led to mental breakdowns and massive insecurities.
So what turned that around?
If I’m entirely honest, I don’t know the exact answer to that question. It’s hard to pinpoint where my love for running took over from the negativity I had been projecting onto it. What I do know, is what made it become a permanent thing.
In March 2018, my dad and I flew to Milano to attend the figure skating world championships. About a hundred meters from our hotel room, stood a big event tent, ran by ‘Stramilano’. I had never entered a running event before – we don’t count my childhood failures – but something about the atmosphere the volunteers created made me want to try it. Mind you, neither me nor my dad had running gear on us on our trip. It took a while to convince him but in the end he figured ‘why not’. The low entry price helped as well as the fact that it was a nice way to explore the city before we had to return home.
Stramilano was a great experience. It was a low pressure race and the people running it were all super friendly. It enabled me to consider myself ‘a runner’ and get over my fear of taking part in races. So although Stramilano wasn’t why I started running, it most definitely is one of the reasons why I haven’t been able to stop ever since.
So that gives you a quick overview of how I was introduced to the sport. To limit my first entry I will end this ‘get to know me’-blogpost with the following list of short questions and answers:
– primary sport: running
– years active: one
– secondary sport(s): cycling, fitness & figure skating
– favorite brand: Nike & Chique Sport
– favorite apps: Nike Run Club, Strava and Zwift
– running highlight: crossing the finish line of my first half marathon
– goals for this year: running a PR on a 5k
– goals for the future: entering a dua- or triathlon
That’s it for today! All I’ve got left to say is that I’m looking forward to reading Shannon’s introduction and that I’m excited to see this blog develop over time.
Julie out.
JuSh Fitness 