Laura jones a friend said “i’m going for a run tonight. do you want to come?” i remember looking at her like she’d grown an extra head!

Laura Jones is a single mum with three daughters who lives in Powys, Wales. She’s also a woman who is passionate about passing on what she knows about fitness and nutrition to other women. She set up We Are Fearless, an online and in-person community for women, in 2021, and now she gets to see other women like herself discover the transformational and empowering effect of running on their lives.

Laura says you should sit down for a minute and imagine the person in your life least likely to fall in love with running; the one who avoided PE at all costs at school and fully embraced the sedentary lifestyle that can come with having young children and babies. Because that was her, she says. The one who didn’t even own trainers and had never tested the amazing things her body could do beyond baby making.

“I was someone who had battled with my weight my entire adult life,” Laura says. “I really had a terrible relationship with my body, with food and with exercise.” She was one of those people who only exercised to get thin. “If I saw a slim person running, I would think, why is she running? She’s already thin,” she confesses.

As a result of this broken relationship with her body image, Laura yo-yo dieted for decades, letting her body size define her. She explains: “I realise now that the size of my body dictated whether I was in a good place in life. I look back to when I had periods of feeling good and know now that it was just because I was thinner at the time. Similarly, I’ve been in really bad places and I can see now that they were times when I was overweight.”

Two heads better than one

In 2017, Laura was coming out of a few years when she was pregnant, giving birth or breastfeeding and, wanting to lose weight, she was back at Slimming World. The post-pregnancy hormones were swooshing around her body, her lifestyle was unhealthy and she was suffering from back and knee pain. It was a turning point.

“It was the first time I wanted to make a change for a reason other than just standing in fro