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September 2020
Sport
Every step matters for the Sole Sisters runners By Caroline Doidge, Sole Sisters running club t’s been over five months since our club has been able to meet, based on government and England Athletics guidelines. A real first for us, as in our 20-year history as a club, we have met every Monday evening (Wednesdays on Bank Holidays), come rain or shine, light nights or dark wintry evenings. Nothing stops the Sole Sisters. In April, Sole Sisters kept running or walking, like most people, as part of the daily exercise allowance, posting our solo activities on the club Facebook page. The coaches created a video, each running and passing the virtual water bottle to each other as a message of support, encouragement and solidarity, in a time when we couldn’t be together as a club. May arrived and we started to
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Sole Sisters near Webbs Wood in the Three Brooks Nature Reserve (left) and on the main Jubilee Centre football pitch
track our collective mileage. One of the coaches counted every mile walked or ran by a Sole Sister. We wanted to know how far we could go, and every step counted. We were missing each other, our family and friends near and far, but the May Miles Mini League, took us on a journey without breaking the rules. Club members, collectively, covered a total distance of 3,851 miles,
averaging 124 miles a day. We all did so well, we were ticking off our holiday destinations (cancelled holidays). By 10th of May we had covered the distance needed to get us to the south coast of Spain. Six days later it was Crete, then Egypt. By the end of the month our club mileage could have taken us (from Baileys Court) to Nevada in the USA, Cancun in Mexico, Kenya, or
even the Chinese province of Qinghai. May saw us go a long way, but we wanted more, as well as walking and running miles, we tracked our elevation, to see what mountains we could climb (virtually of course). In just 12 days our collective elevation took us to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro (and back down again). I used to think that us
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