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Claire Van Dam


After years of doing essentially no real exercise I saw 40 approaching and vowed to sort my life out. I’d always loved athletics at school and had attempted pretty much every team sport at university so I was no stranger to running myself silly. It had just been a really long time….. I was looking for some inspiration and along the way I’d had to admit to myself that I had an allergy to being in a gym or a studio (all those people, all that sweat, all those germs! Yuck!!!) so indoors was never going to be an option. I approached Kerry because she offered to be there week in week out, come rain or shine, encouraging her clients in the great outdoors. I agreed to get going and set the objective bar low: turn up regularly and learn to enjoy running.

For the last 14 months I’ve attended two sessions a week: a circuits class on a Monday (invariably in the mud and rain) and a run session. I fairly quickly progressed from never having run for more than 25 minutes at a time, to a 10km race and more recently to a half marathon. Kerry’s focussed strength training, weekly run purgatory, oops, I mean hills and sprint work and gentle(ish) encouragement to put the effort in outside her sessions has led me to run faster than I’d ever thought possible. And what’s probably more important, for the first time, after a year’s work, I actually enjoyed it!!

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