Share your story with Running Woman

As most of you will know, Running Woman's ambition is to spread the running love as far and as wide as we possibly can, trying to encourage and motivate women from all aspects of life to participate in running and to highlight the benefits of running on an individuals general well-being. Hopefully by the very fact that you are here and part of our amazing community, you either already appreciate this or are on the positive road to running enlightenment.

We invest lots of our efforts in fairly normal forms of advertising, which works fine, we actually invest more in our products and service because we believe that's something that sets our community apart from others, and we also have one of the best reward programs available which allows you to introduce your friends to Running Woman with a discount for them and a reward for you on top (we'd rather give back to you than advertising platforms), but we're always looking at ways we can do things differently so we spent a long time thinking hard about how we try and explain what it is that we feel makes Running Woman so special...

The answer we came up with was surprisingly simple... We think YOU make Running Woman such an amazing community and as such we'd like to try telling your stories to see if we can encourage others who may resonate with your story to give it a go. We would love it, for anyone whom is prepared to share their story to volunteer to give a short period of time at your convenience with a friend of Running Woman, a local and talented writer, whom we have had the pleasure of working with in our past running ventures, who has agreed to support us in our desire to continue spreading the running love. We'll tell you a little more about Andrew below because we feel it's important you understand why we have chosen him to try and tell these stories ethically, conscientiously and sensitively, we trust him implicitly, but we need you to trust him too.

Some points we want to be open about upfront.

We have thousands of beautifully amazing women in our community, and this is initially just a trial, during which we will be trying to tell 4 or 5 individuals stories, we will not be able to interview you all, participation is not a sign that you have a story better than anyone else's any more than if you are not selected it should be taken as a sign that we are not interested in your story... We have personally read so many amazing stories in the last year that we'd like to write them all up and publish a book just to highlight how amazing you all are... But we've got too many medals to pack to do that because you keep smashing it every month! :)
If you are selected, it will be your story, you will have full autonomy over how it reads, if you're not happy with it for whatever reason, we will change it to suit and if you are still not happy with it, we simply will not use it... We will not break any confidences in this process, you are too important to us to do that.
We are doing this because we want to share your story, and when we shout about something we can on occasion be heard from far and wide, so we know our community is a safe space for you to share, but our aim is to be able to share these stories outside of our community to show just a handful of reasons why our community is so special, if for whatever reason, your anonymity is important for your own well-being, this is possibly not the time to share your story.

Some details about friend of Running Woman, Andrew Simpson and why we would like him to help us tell your stories.

Andrew is a journalist who can switch between telling the story of his hometown Olympic champion and another on an octogenarian crown green bowler's first title.
His next challenge is to explore the mind of both for a project titled: ‘The Game Is Mental’. It intends to demonstrate the impact participation in sport and physical activity has on emotional health with the aim of confronting stigma and encouraging compassion.
A champion and media volunteer for the Time to Change campaign, a social movement to working to change the way we think and act about mental health, Andrew has shared his own experience and is trained to assist others to do the same.
He was shortlisted for an industry award two years ago by judges impressed by a portfolio made up exclusively of features that celebrated the achievements of women in sport, both amateur and professional. That included the story of a rower recovering from a rare form of cancer and the first female to become the highest-ranking rugby official in the county of Cheshire.
He is also amongst a high profile list of signatories on the Mental Health Media Charter.

What to do next if you'd like to help us spread the running love

Simply fill in your name and contact details below along with a very brief outline of what story you'd like to share, no more than a sentence or two, just to help us, we will contact you if we need more information.

Finally, thank you so much in advance, just for reading this lengthy page, most importantly, keep up the good work, RW x