If you’d asked Jessica Ennis-Hill to run a 10km while she was training, she would have given you a firm no, or in her words, “there’s absolutely no way”. Despite winning four gold medals (one in the Olympics) as a heptathlete, the furthest distance she ran was 800m.
Now, at 40, the former athlete and Vitality ambassador “loves running longer distances” but knows perhaps more than anyone that building up to changing your exercise habits and that finding a new routine is a process. “You’ve got to have a plan and build up to it,” she tells woman&home in an exclusive interview. “It’s absolutely achievable.”
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1. Challenge yourself – but be realistic
Getting going is the hardest part of running as a beginner, says Jessica. “I think it’s really hard to take that initial step to start running, whether you see yourself as a natural runner or you’re taking up running at a certain stage in your life.
“It’s all about forming those consistent habits, but also knowing that you don’t have to run every day or all the time. That sets you up to fall a little bit. You have to be able to slot in those moments where you need to rest, and you might change the way you run,” she says.
For example, you may have had a longer run in mind, but a busy day may have set you back a few hours. Don’t worry – adjust your routine and head out the door anyway. Just go for a shorter run, like an interval session, instead.
2. Don’t let the weather hold you back
Come rain or shine, pull on your trainers and head out the door if you’ve made the time for it in your schedule. “The weather has been miserable lately. It definitely makes you feel like you don’t have the energy or motivation to go out. I think, for me, I always tell myself that feeling of being on the other side of a run, especially when you’ve been out when you don’t want to, is so elating. You’ve just got to take those initial steps, and that hit of dopamine you’ll have after running will be worth it,” she says.
“If you know you’re going to get wet, just own it. I get a cap on, get my waterproofs, and I do feel brilliant. You feel like you’ve really ticked all the boxes.”
3. Include plenty of variety
A running plan is essential if you have a certain distance in mind, want to be able to run for a longer time, or run faster. Typically, most running plans (including those on running apps) will program a long run, an easy run, and a speed run into your week.
“The variety of the runs you do is really important,” says Jessica. “You might go for a long run, but then you might do intervals (a type of speed workout).”
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Together, these help build endurance, strength, and cardiovascular fitness, all of which are essential for every type of runner.
4. Adjust your routine to see progress
“You don’t have to jump in with those really long runs and unrealistic challenges,” she warns. “It can just be 15 minutes of walk/run/walk/run (a technique known as Jeffing), or it could be a 20-minute session. It doesn’t have to be a massive undertaking of exercise.
“Everything I’ve learnt from my career, it has to be a build-up. You start here, and then you change it slightly. You might go a bit longer, you might go shorter, but a bit faster. It’s just making all those tweaks to the way you exercise that creates those long-term physiological benefits and improves your aerobic capacity and ability to go further,” she says.
5. Include other types of exercise to support your body
“Women need to do weights, particularly at a certain age,” she says, and particularly if you want to start running regularly.
Strength training for runners (and Pilates for runners) not only improves lower-body strength and stability, lowering the risk of injury, but it also improves running efficiency, making the exercise feel easier.
Other than that, Jessica says that she’d recommend yoga and Pilates – and has started doing more reformer Pilates recently. “These are something that actually helps your ability to exercise at the level you want for longer. Reformer Pilates just switches on all the little muscles so you can handle those longer runs a little bit better, and your movement patterns are just better.”
Along with activities to support her running, Jessica has found joy in a new activity: padel. “It’s a craze! Everyone’s playing padel. But for me, it’s testing my mental capacity to understand how to play that I’ve not done before. It switches me on, there’s a lovely social element to it. Physically, you can work really hard as well. So I’ve been trying different ways to be active, but still go back to the basics of how I like to train,” she says.
“It’s definitely less intense on the body (than tennis). It’s a smaller court, you’re not having to cover as much space. It’s not as explosive, and you’ve got more time with the ball. It’s inclusive. A good spot to pick up if you want to try something new.”
It’s this dedication to variety and finding enjoyment in movement that Jessica says fits so well with her role as a Vitality ambassador. “It can be really challenging for women to find routes and paths into exercise. There seems to be so many more barriers for us, and Vitality does a fantastic job at showing the research and numbers, and inspiring more people to be active,” she says.