I have been asked that more times than I can count, always kindly, usually by someone who means well. Sometimes about the boxing. Sometimes about the 5am. Once, memorably, about all of it at the same time, by a woman at a school gate who genuinely could not work out where it fitted.
And the honest answer is that it does not fit. It is made to fit, every single week, out of the awkward corners of a life that already had things in it. There is no version of this where the hours were sitting there waiting for me.
What nobody tells you is how much of the difficulty is not physical. The training is the easy part. The hard part is the small, constant negotiation with everybody's expectations of what a woman in her forties with a job and children is supposed to be spending her energy on — and the quiet suggestion, never quite said aloud, that wanting something this much for yourself is a little bit selfish.
The hour I take is what makes the other fifteen possible. I have stopped apologising for it, and that took considerably longer than learning to throw a decent cross.
This industry reinvents itself every eight weeks. A new protocol, a new supplement, a new woman on a screen doing something you are apparently already behind on. It is exhausting, and it is designed to be — because a person who feels behind is a person who buys.
I have chased some of it. The powders, the plans, the drawer I have written about elsewhere on this site. What survived was almost embarrassingly plain: lift, run, box, eat enough protein, sleep, repeat for years. Everything else was weather.
So the standard here is simple. Follow what interests you, try what appeals, and measure all of it against one question — does this still work on my worst week? If it only works when everything else is calm, it was never yours. It was a trend borrowing your attention.
That is the whole of what I hope they take from it. Not a body. A default setting.
NHS shifts, full family life, three disciplines trained at intensity. This is not a sample plan. This is the real schedule — what fitting it all in genuinely looks like when there is no perfect window and no one to hold you accountable except yourself.
45 min · home gym · evening
Pre-sunrise trail with Luna · 60 min technique & bag, evening
45 min · home gym · evening
60–75 min · evening
Lunch break · road
Morning · 2–3 hrs total · Luna sets the pace
Be a human being.
3× runs · 3× lifts · 2× boxing · 1 rest day — every week, around a full-time job
Not athletes. Not people with time. People who train anyway — around shifts, around children, around a body that is forty and knows it. Everything on this site is written from inside that life, because it is the one I am living.
It was not fitness. It was grief. My dad was an addict, I did not see him for the last five years of his life, and I began running because I had a quantity of it that would not fit inside a house.
Every long run is still for him. It is the one page on this site that is not really about training at all.