My first race was a Race for Life. 2006-ish. I'd signed up with a friend who didn't show, and I have no memory of finishing it. I do remember not wanting to be there.
It would be more than a decade before running became mine.
Then 2020 happened. The world shrunk and, somehow, running expanded. It became my time outdoors. My way of staying sane. The thing I went back to when nothing else made sense. I ran my first marathon that year, the Virtual London Marathon, plotted around the roads near home, with a “finish line” invented at my favourite coffee place in town. I fell in love with it.
Up until that year, every form of exercise I'd ever done had been quietly about shrinking. Counting steps. Counting calories. Counting against myself. 2020 was the first time I noticed that the running was doing more for my head than it was for my body, and I'd been measuring it on the wrong axis the whole time.
Once you notice that, you can't un-notice it. Every tracking app I tried wanted me to eat less. Every running plan I followed was written for a body without a cycle. The whole infrastructure of women's running, was built around making us smaller, and then training us as though our physiology was an inconvenience.
That's the bit I couldn't let go of.
In 2023, I quietly rewrote my coaching business. The old version had been about aesthetics: how to look, how to lose, how to fit. The new version was about performance: how to get fitter, faster, stronger. The fittest, fastest, strongest version of you, whether that meant your first 5K or your first ultramarathon.
VIRRA is what came after that.
It's the platform I wish I'd had when I was running with a Fitbit in one hand and MyFitnessPal in the other, trying to figure out which one was the liar.
What I want VIRRA to be is the permission slip.
Permission to train hard, relax harder, and fuel yourself instead of starving yourself. Permission to have the Friday night pizza. Permission to skip the long run when your body is under-recovered, and to trust that you know that better than the app does. Permission to stop treating your cycle as the inconvenience your training plan thinks it is.
I'm not an elite athlete. I'm a runner, a coach, and a woman who grew up being told that little girls should be seen and not heard, like a lot of us did. Most of that took until my thirties to undo.
We should be heard.
That's what VIRRA is for.