Thanks for supporting me on my crazy quest to run across Yorkshire this Summer.
What?
I’ll be “Running Yorkshire” for 7 days, starting on Monday 26th July from the Lancashire border to the West of Skipton and finishing in Hull on Sunday 1st August (Yorkshire Day, of course)
Why?
I’m taking on this challenge to raise awareness about the Gender Sport Gap in primary schools. See Sporty Be Sporty CIC is a non-profit I co-founded last year that works with women and girls who want to feel more confident in physical activity and sport. We know from research that girls begin to doubt their sporting ability from age 7, and that transition to secondary school often sees the biggest drop in participation levels. With this project I want to raise awareness of this issue, and to hopefully raise enough money to get a set of our Role Models posters of girls age 11-16 doing the sports that they love (plus free school lesson resources and a virtual assembly) into every primary school in North and East Yorkshire. We have already raised enough funding to do the same in West and South Yorkshire, so this would complete the whole of Yorkshire and put our posters in front of around 2500 schools and over 400,000 pupils. My own mini reason for wanting to take on a challenge like this is that I spend a lot of my time telling, and showing, people that they can do more than they think. And using running to do that. It struck me during the recent lockdown, when inspired by the experience of a group of awesome women taking on our online Desk to 5k course, that I wasn’t doing anything more than I knew was possible. I’m still not sure that I can run across Yorkshire. But I’d like to do something I’m not sure I can do.
