Joanne Smith turned to running to cope with fibromyalgia and chronic pain, eventually training for a marathon. She later stepped back from competition to focus on low-pressure activities like hiking and running for enjoyment rather than achievement.
am I doing this? Like, how did that happen? It was never even on my bucket list to even become a— never mind a marathon runner, even just to become a runner in itself was never even on my bucket list. It was never one of those things where I thought one day I'd love to go and run a marathon. I never even saw myself as even being a runner, but I became a runner by default on the back of developing chronic pain and chronic symptoms, fibromyalgia, other symptoms, and it became a thing that I found respite in somehow. So it wasn't as though I had this dream to do that. It became a fix. It became a Joanne needs fixing. That seems to be helping. So then it became something that I just ended up doing. So long story short, I made the decision after all those years that I wasn't really going to do that anymore. I'll still do things for the fun of it, I've been invited to go do the Yorkshire Three Peaks in a few weeks. Gonna go and run. We'll hike the hilly bits, we'll run the runnable, we'll run it and then walk the bits that are walkable. Whatever. I said yes, like, because that's my kind of no-agenda fun. There's nowhere to be, there's no time to be, there's nothing to achieve. It's just go and have a great day out kind of thing.
