Hey friends...
There’s something slightly ironic about feeling the weight of a full-time job, childcare, relationships, parental duties, training for marathons, and content creation, and then adding more onto the mental motherload by launching a website.
But I think I’ve always been that way. I’m a little fidgety in life, even if I do occasionally wish for a bit of quiet nothingness. I like setting myself challenges, admittedly, biting off more than I can chew sometimes, but the focus and pressure prevent me from defaulting to my natural-born form… a British baked potato.
If you’ve landed here, there’s a good chance you’ve come from YouTube or Instagram, or better yet, my attempt to charm the SEO overlords has worked, and you’ve fallen down a Google rabbit hole looking for something along the lines of “I want to be fitter, but life is already full”, or “I want to see normal people struggle doing hard things, but then does them and that’s a bit inspiring”.
I hate to hit you with an anti-climax, but I don’t have the answer. I’m figuring a lot of this out as I go. However, I do like to document and share what I’m doing, how I make (try to make) things work, and how sometimes it just doesn’t, and that’s ok. Maybe you find some inspiration in it, or at least are entertained.
The journey so far…
For a long time, I knew exactly who I was in the context of sport. I was a mountain biker. Not casually, not occasionally, but properly. Riding my bike basically shaped my day-to-day life, my work, and a vast part of my social life. I’ve worked in the bike industry for over a decade, and with that, built a version of myself that revolved around two wheels. I mean, I even qualified as a bike mechanic, worked at my local bike shop, and became a certified British Cycling guide, taking people out to explore the Afan Valley by bike.
Then things shifted very quickly, and all at once. I got pregnant.
Pregnancy wasn’t the idyllic, glowing experience TV had made it out to be. It was emotionally beautiful and physically savage. I was really sick, and when that passed (after 16 weeks), my body had about as many nutrients and strength as a husk. I felt like the corpse of an animal that a blowfly had laid its larva in to feed. Suffice it to say, pregnancy changed my relationship with my body in ways I hadn’t really prepared for. Postpartum didn’t come with a clear roadmap either. There’s a version of the narrative that suggests you simply “find your way back”, but in reality, it felt more like trying to rebuild something that didn’t quite fit the same way anymore.
That in-between stage, where you don’t feel like your old self, but you’re not sure who the new version is yet, is a strange place to exist. I kept telling myself that although I love being a Mom, and I am first-and-foremost a mother, I am also MORE THAN JUST a mother. I’m still me, somewhere inside the extra 20kg of weight I was carrying.
Somewhere in the middle of that, I signed up for the London Marathon. Not because I’d always dreamed of being a runner, far from it! I wasn’t and have never been a “runner”, and I actually hated the idea of it, but it gave me something to aim for. Something structured, something slightly intimidating, and something that felt far enough outside of my comfort zone to mean something.
Running, as it turns out, was much harder than I thought, and so much slower than riding a bike (naturally). There’s a lot more time spent alone with your thoughts because running strips things back in a way that’s both frustrating and also very raw. Raw human-powered, no frills, no equipment. It’s just you. And I didn’t realise that I actually needed that at the time.
Fast-Forward to now.
As I launch this website, I’ve now run three marathons in the last 12 months. I guess London opened up a floodgate, where I found myself somewhat addicted to the process and progress of training and performance, something I never had with riding. I’m still considered a slow runner by most, with a personal-best marathon time of 5:12:00, but given how far I’ve come from my first marathon time of 6:38:00, I’m pretty proud of that, and I plan to chip that PB down even further.
I’m currently training for my 4th marathon, in October 2026, and I’m really stepping up by incorporating a lot more strength work, time on Zwift and running. I just don’t quite know yet how that’ll all fit into the full-time working Mom-life just yet, but balancing it out is part of the fun, right?
My plan is to document and share my journey through storytelling and content, which you can (and please do) follow on YouTube and Instagram.
Wish me luck!