About

Julia is a coach, healer, and writer for Running Free magazine. She has been running all her life, and helping others find happiness and fulfillment in their lives for almost as long. This site is about her running journey, charting the twists and turns on a never ending path, allowing the lessons learned in seeking to master her running allow better understanding to master her life and to help her teach others to follow their path, listen to their voice – to be true to themselves, fulfill their human potential and reach for their destiny!

A little about Julia…

I was born in 1959, so have just completed a half century ‘not out’. My mother went out at 50 years old leaving behind two lost girls and a very sad man.

My first book told of my running story and about this lost girl – of how the wounding and unresolved pain showed up in her running journey through self-destructive tendencies. It seemed there was a desire to sabotage her every effort of peace, and the recognition within herself that she was okay.

So this was how I spent my first 50 years – a rather hazardous running journey, a rather hazardous personal journey romantically, and a thread of light that ran though all of this in my work – I could heal.

This was evident and it showed in the lives I touched – this kept me alive I believe and gave me a purpose. But a life that helps to resolve other people’s and has not resolved itself cannot be true really.

‘Healer, heal thyself.’

We teach best by example – and as a healer the biggest commitment is to heal yourself. From this position you can be of assistance in guiding and supporting another – a still and clear reflection for them to explore themselves in. If you go towards someone in an attempt to look after or rescue them it is important to always ask what your own underlying emotion is, for this is the place of your own wounding and where healing is required within you.

And so as a healer my commitment is to run, strange as that may seem! My soul expression, the ‘most important thing to me’ – the place where I can see I hold back, where my fear is – of not measuring up, not being good enough. The gun goes and at the end of the race I will find out if I have permission to ‘be here’, permission to hold my head up! Running is such a simple action, one foot in front of the other – such a natural action and yet within this simple action has laid my sense of self – all of my life, if I am truthful.

Nowadays I am at peace in a way I certainly never was. I am injury free – I run miles and miles and love it, a joyous freedom that was never there before. I am running for myself – for the first time in my life.
I have worked hard to find this place ease and joy. In the past I ran to please my dad, then my coach and then any man I connected with intimately, and then anyone and everyone… but now I am free… Or am I?

Recently, I ran the Nice marathon. I have been training for this event for months with Fiona, my friend and training partner. We have had such an amazing journey, running early in the morning, hours of running and expansive, explorative dialogue – and at the culmination of this particular journey, I am delighted with my run of 3 hours 14 mins 31 seconds (on the chip! – 46 seconds on the clock!) I hoped to break 3 hours 15 – so ‘great performance and more to come’ was my response.

I ran in my Nike Frees, just like running barefoot. I have worked my way back to this state of balance and health that I experienced as a young runner. I ran barefoot – free and fast – then, not a care in the world. I ran till my lungs burst. I hung on and was fearless.

Then I got hurt and my journey has been to return to that place of fearlessness, that freedom of expression.

The race was a watershed for me. I have achieved a state of ease so apparently lacking in the life described in my first book, Running to Learn.

I love where I live, I love my work, I love my running – I live alone now and that ‘longing within’ to find ‘the one’ has calmed and I see that I am ‘the one’ in my life.

My driving force is still relationship, but not necessarily in the ‘traditional sense’ for me. I believe that we see ourselves reflected back in our relationships, we see the parts that are unhealed, the parts we wish to reclaim, the parts that we have hidden away. In the reflection of others we can see the gift of completing ourselves. And the more intimate the relating, the more we are safe enough to allow the unhealed parts to show and to find a place of healing.

Turning 50 for me was like a re-birth. I have lived beyond my Mother. I am in uncharted waters now and I feel free of the baggage of my past – except… that when I run races I still hear the faint echo of the ‘voices’ – ‘should/could do better’, ‘ not good enough’, and I am curious to access what that is about. It is my belief that even though I don’t notice those voices elsewhere, if they pop up in my running then perhaps they are colouring all of my life, very subtly.

What would happen if I gave everything to my dream? Have I ever given my all since those early days of my burning lungs? And why not?

What do I fear will happen if I pour my whole being out onto the race track – all of me – nothing held back?
What does any of us fear about living fully?

As I commit to myself more fully than ever, before allowing whatever is in me out – what will happen in the rest of my life? Who will I attract in – what work will come my way – what opportunities – what will happen in my relationships…?

The road less travelled is beckoning me, even though the form of journeying on my own two legs is familiar, the terrain is new and unknown. I am journeying to a place I have never been before… Please join me as I journey, I think it might be revealing and fun and maybe we will discover things we never knew before…