Sunday 9th October 2016.
That's the date six of the ELLE Fit team, including Editor-in-Chief Lorraine Candy, now have etched in our minds.
We're going to be running The Royal Parks Foundation Half Marathon.
This week, with a countdown of 75 days, we started our training outside in the sunshine with Harry Norman a PT at Third Space gym.
The first thing he asked us to do was take off our trainers.
'Whaaaaat?' We cried.
But Harry wasn't about to make us go on a barefoot run or do a 'Jesus' and attempt to complete the course without shoes, like this guy did at this year's London Marathon...
We were just going back to basics, finding out where we each felt pressure on our feet to make sure we weren't applying too much in any one area.
Shoes still off, we went through a series of stretches to improve our mobility and simple exercises we could do as a warm up before running.
These included 3D hamstring activation (side lunge reaching to the straight leg) and pelvic tilts.
We also walked while Harry filmed us and however different our gaits, we all had one thing in common: our right shoulders were lopsided from carrying heavy bags.
Note to selves: buy a rucksack.
Trainers back on, we ran a short distance at 50-70% and then repeated the stretches before running again.
Each time we ran we felt our bodies were much more engaged than before and we were more conscious of our running styles.
Harry's strategy for the first training session was to help prevent injury by helping with our mobility.
Which bodes well for our next session…
Team ELLE will be training with Third Space gym and running the Royal Parks Foundation Half Marathon to raise money for mental health charity MIND. Watch this space for our fundraising page.
