Giovanna Fletcher is an actor, author, podcaster, Queen of the Castle – and she’s a runner! She explains how running keeps her fit for her passion; leading treks to raise money for CoppaFeel!, the breast cancer charity
Words: Rachel Ifans
Giovanna Fletcher
Treks with Gi cover 100KM and take place over numerous days, often in tough terrain
Back in 2019, when Giovanna Fletcher – author, actor, presenter, blogger and soon-to-be winner of I’m a Celebrity – had just had her third baby, Bryony Gordon asked if she would do the London Vitality 10,000 in her underwear. Bryony must have caught Gi at the right moment because, despite not being a runner at the time, she said yes. And that was where her relationship with running took its first tentative steps. Before that, running for Gi had been memories of incessant stitch and tantrums when her dad would drag her out on runs with him.
And while it wasn’t exactly love at second sight all those years later, it didn’t take Gi long to recognise the benefits of running in adulthood. She explains: “I found running really tough physically to start with. The first minute or so felt fine but then all of a sudden, everything would get quite heavy and hard.”
She was teaching a postpartum body a new way of being and it was very different to all the other exercise she’d done before. That said, she couldn’t deny the way it made her feel afterwards. She says: “I realised early on that running completely changed my attitude and my mentality. I think I’m of the generation where exercise used to be about punishing your body into shape. Punish it so that it falls into whatever shape society told us bodies should look like. But the 10K changed that; I started to run for my brain and for my mind.”
Feeling light
Gi is a busy mum of three who’s also just starred in the current production of Everybody’s Talking About Jamie on stage. It doesn’t matter what’s going on in your life, she says, there are times for everyone when things sit heavily on your shoulders. “After I go out for a run, everything is still there but it’s just slightly elevated.” In other words, the detritus of life isn’t crushing you anymore. It’s sitting just an inch or so higher, and that can make all the difference. “If I’ve been out for a run,” Gi continues, “my problems don’t feel quite as big anymore. I feel like I’m a better wife and a better mum, and I seem to be able to handl
