I spent several decades unfairly hating running. It’s not running’s fault that it sucks so much and it’s not my fault that I suck so much at it. It’s just the way it is. And yet. Recently fate has brought us together. We’re not soul mates or anything, but we’re coping. Maybe in part because I wasn’t coping and now at least I have a way to physically and metaphorically enact my not-coping with the side benefits of fresh air, cardio and a topic for a newsletter.

So I have a little skin in the game, but it feels like more of a hangnail. My feats of running are hardly worth tracking in Strava, never mind a whole newsletter. This is not where I’ll be trying to impress you with my splits or 5km PB. If you’re interested in tips on how to train or ways to dial in your performance, this isn’t for you. Don’t worry, there are trainloads of accounts that do an amazing job of that. I’m more interested in what running can teach us. I’m fascinated in what it does to our characters (if anything). I want to know more about why people (including myself) run: the internal places we’re running from or to. I am obsessed with what drives certain people to choose to do hard things.

My name is Kimberly Brown and I’m an illustrator and author based in a little town next to the ocean on the east coast of NSW, Australia. I am the proud (and exhausted) mother of two kids - both neurodiverse. One of them never speaks, the other one never stops (this is not an exaggeration). Somewhere along the journey of trying to impress people, forging a career, becoming a parent and having a solid go at being an adult, I started losing things. Important things. Not just my keys, phone or pelvic floor (we’re gonna get honest around here), but my autonomy, independence, sense of adventure, ability to take risks, to take charge of my life, or the ability to parallel park. I dropped them somewhere in the scramble to try to hold everything together.

Until I wasn’t. Because we never really are, are we? And I had to come up hard against the reality of, well REALITY. There comes a time in everyone’s life when you realise that there are no rules and no referee and if you came expecting anything, least of all a fair fight, then you’re going to go home sore and sorely disappointed. As the Buddha sagely pointed out, “Life is suffering.” What you want doesn’t matter and no one, and I mean no one, is going to save you or fix you or live your life for you. I mean this in the most empowering way, because once you get over that hurricane of realisation, you’re free to start taking back your own lived experience.

For me that looked like going for a walk. I couldn’t stop. The colder and rainier it was, the more I wanted to head outside - into the blustery downpour because I could feel it. The rain, sure, but what I felt was the sensation of being alive. I started running because the feeling would grab me around my lungs, burn through my legs. The more I ran around outside, the more I realised it was changing me. It was taking this soggy, sad, self-obsessed sack of meat and transforming it into something stronger, something with shape and substance.

So at some point I started 'Outsider.’ It’s a newsletter I write and illustrate that uses running literally and metaphorically to explore what it feels like to grow up. Outside is where all the good things are happening: outside our comfort zones, outside our perceptions and expectations, outside our myopic view of ourselves.

So that’s about it. Subscribe if you want to see it for yourself.