My name is Portia Jones, or Pip to use my lifelong nickname. Cardiff born, but worldly travelled, I’ve now settled back into my hometown of Cardiff with my husband Luke and our pet fishes.
I’ll make a confession, I’ve never run before, not even for a bus, I get exhausted just thinking about it frankly. I’m the kind of girl who will be sat in Bute Park cafe sipping a latte feeling sorry for the joggers that run past, why run when you can have a coffee and a cake right?
So why start now you might ask? If it wasn’t for a culmination of recent events, I might never have had the motivation to be honest. Firstly, a good friend of mine was sadly diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and has started some pretty aggressive chemo. I felt strongly that I should do something to show my support but I had no idea what? Then fuelled by several chardonnays one night I proudly (and drunkenly) announced to friends that I was going to run a 5k for charity next year to raise money for a cancer charity, to show my solidarity. “But you hate running”, was their immediate and cackling response and that was exactly the point of my ‘wine promise’, as it’s now called. It seemed to me that it would be hard, I would be starting completely from scratch on something I’ve never attempted before but that’s what would make it a challenge and enable me to feel like I was doing something, however small it might be.
The second thing that spurred me on was that I had just launched my own Travel and Lifestyle blog – Pip and the City and I was starting to wonder if maybe I could blog about my running experiences to help inspire others to start running when serendipity stepped in and I saw that Run Wales happened to be looking for bloggers too, so it seemed that now I had all the motivation I needed.
So this is how I start my journey, I now have a pair of running shoes, a kick ass running playlist on Spotify and a new water bottle but still in many ways completely clueless. I imagine I am going to need a lot of support, advice and guidance and I’m sure that when it’s sideways rain and 2 degrees I am going to want to give up but if I can pull through and run a race for charity to show my friend that I support her, then it will all be worth it. I will blog about my experiences along the way and hopefully it may encourage others to take the first shaky steps towards becoming a runner, if I can do it, anyone can.