Hot, sweaty and out of breath. . . I’m in love with sport at last

This time last Saturday (if you’re a morning person) I was wading through waist-high, freezing water, ploughing through mud up to my knees and singing “Happy Birthday” to a complete stranger.

As the group of women around me sang louder, the birthday girl took a leap into a shallowish mud lake, before rolling her beautiful Rubenesque body in the dirt to the accompanying cheers of all around her. Covered from head to toe in mud, she got up and we all continued our 5km “Brutal Run” through the undulating twists, turns and inclines of a wood in deepest Hampshire.

At 47 years of age, I have finally fallen in love with exercise. Where is Miss Sergeant, my fearsome PE teacher from secondary school, whose lessons I spent so many years trying to dodge? If only she could see me now.

I’ve always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with exercise, and if I am honest there has been more hate than love. I had a gym membership, but all that I can recall from it is that they did a mean coffee in the bar. I did an online “couch potato to 5km” programme, but once I’d achieved the 5km, I put my headphones away and thought “that’s that”. I hired a personal trainer, who was lovely but made me feel totally inadequate (I’m sure she didn’t mean it). I found it really embarrassing if I bumped into friends when I was out with her, huffing and puffing. I tried walking – it's about 11km around Richmond Park, near London, where I live – but as a working mother of three, I rarely, if ever, have a spare two hours on my hands.

However, my circumstances changed dramatically in October 2013, with the death of my beloved mum. Along with my sisters, I had spent the past few years helping look after her. I felt terrible after she died – tired, listless, lost and overweight. But I realised that I had absolutely no one but myself to blame. It was time to find something I could commit to and stick with.

My lifesaving light-bulb moment came in the shape of a fitness camp called 'Plan B’, which I could attend in my local park. I decided to devote two hours to the classes per week. With my mum gone, surely I could spare 120 minutes? There would be no diets, no faddish fasting; this camp was based on getting fit and having fun in the great outdoors.

When I turned up that first cold December morning in 2013, I was paralysed with fear about what would be expected. I dragged along my friend Carmel – there I was, pushing 50, and I still didn't have the guts to go on my own.

Just over 12 months on I feel like a different person. I have more energy; I sleep like a (good) baby; and if I miss one of my sessions, I acquire a kind of nervous twitch.

“We won’t come if it’s not fun,” Natalie, one of the group members, told me early on. She was so right.

^{Tough training, but the women still have fun (Andrew Crowley)}

One evening towards the end of last year, my late-flowering love of exercise saw me out happily socialising with my fellow boot- campers. After a few glasses of wine too many, we all drunkenly shouted “yes” when Rachel, one of the girls, suggested we tackle a 5km “Brutal Run”.

As the organisers’ website says: “These events will make you wish you had never taken up exercise. Each event uses only natural obstacles such as hills – steep ones and flat ones. There are often water obstacles, mud, uneven ground – and hills.”

Ah, yes, those hills. I ran headlong down one, simply unable to stop, even with my friend Nikki trying bravely and generously to let me run into her. Finally tripping over my mud-clad, size-seven trainers (since consigned to the bin), I slid sideways down the rest of the slope, coming to a graceful but completely sodden stop at the bottom.

^{5km of brutal running, but they still smile at the finish line (Sally Bliss)}

On Saturday’s run more than 800 women, including 20 with dogs, whooped, shrieked and hollered their way around the course – one lap for the 5km “runners” such as me, and an altogether hellish two laps for the really bonkers ones. Being lapped by two women in fancy dress, and with a dog, was probably my only low point.

But the spirit of camaraderie was superb, even if the water – at one point neck-high when I lost my footing – and the mud made for slow progress. As Becky Russell, one of the Brutal organisers, says, the all-girls-together bonding is vital: “A female-only event is a great way to enjoy running with your friends — and hundreds of other women.”

Chris Hipsey, who owns Plan B Fitness Camps in Surrey, is similarly unequivocal about the benefits of exercising in groups with like-minded people. “Doing anything alone is always harder than doing it with friends, in a team or a group environment. Everything is easier if you have support and encouragement,” he says.

I can vouch for that. As an unsporty, unconfident, unfit youngster, I hated every single PE lesson I ever did – except for hockey and netball. After leaving the compulsory education system, one of my greatest joys was not having to squeeze my sturdy frame into a skimpy Aertex top and short PE skirt. I didn’t so much as put on a pair of trainers again until I was 30. Those same trainers were used so infrequently that I wore them for the following 16 years. This month I am on my third pair since December 2013.

^{Josie and the Plan B campers in training (Andrew Crowley)}

I love my fellow “Plan B campers”, as we are affectionately known. These women have transformed my attitude to getting hot, sweaty and out of breath. What’s more, whenever I am feeling cross, fed up or generally rubbish, five minutes into a session with this lot I find that I am magically feeling better.

In the words of the just-launched campaign from the government agency Sport England designed to attract women just like me to exercise – “This Girl Can”. I can run 5km. I can be fitter and healthier. I can lose weight (my next goal), and hell — I can, and have, finally learnt to love exercise. It may have taken me a slow one hour, 18 minutes to do my first “Brutal” – but I lapped every other person who was still in bed. That’s progress.