Joanne Smith started running at 31 in old gym trainers and hit intense foot and calf pain. A friend's trick of rolling a frozen water bottle over her leg helped, and switching to proper running shoes fixed it completely. She kept going.
When I first started running, I— oh, how old were I when I started running? 31. And I knew nothing about anything. I knew nothing about footwear, shoes. I didn't know nothing about running. And I just wore a pair of trainers that I'd had since I was about 18 years old that I used to go to the gym in when I were in sixth form. I think I had that same pair of gym trainers for a few years because, you know, I didn't go outdoors with them. They seemed fine. And then I joined the running beginners It was a Run England, it was a 10-week course. We went up to 10K at the end of the 10 weeks, and I was wearing a pair of random trainers that were the same foot size as me. I was a size 4, so I wore size 4 trainers. And at the time, I suffered horrible pain. I never really knew why, never actually figured out why, never really analysed it. It just sort of, luckily, it just sorted itself out in time. I think maybe as my, maybe just the— The muscles. The muscles got stronger. I'll never know how or why. Maybe I was lucky, but I did spend a lot of time with— somebody told me, ice a bottle of water, keep a bottle of water in the freezer, and you can roll your foot up and down it, and you can roll your calf up and down it. This is what somebody told me to do, like, right back all those years ago when I didn't really know nothing about any of these kind of pains. So I just did that. I just used to, like, it felt nice. It was relaxing. It was icy cold and I'd just roll it up and down, my foot under my instep, up the back of my calf and up the front of my leg, and I'd just roll it. And that's kind of what I did. And then I did get new trainers eventually also, so potentially a mixture of new shoes, a bit of cold icy bottle of water rolling up and down, just a nice bit of massage really more than anything. And then eventually I never looked back and I never suffered again with it.
