HOW SHE DID IT Essential Tips for Newbies

Filsan Abdiaman wasn’t always the fit, happy runner and personal trainer that she is today.

After a bad breakup in 2014, Abdiaman went back to Kenya, where she had grown up, and was working at a not-for-profit. She felt unmoored. She sublimated her emotional duress in poor eating habits and was gaining weight. Her family wondered what she was doing with her life. Finally her sister came to visit her in Kenya, in the spring of 2014, and talked tough. “I remember crying so much and telling her that I don’t know what to do. She told me to just go back to Canada and start journalling.” Abdiaman took her advice, but first went to the doctor. The results from her check-up scared her.

“I was borderline diabetic and had high cholesterol. I couldn’t believe that I had got myself to that point over a breakup.” Upon returning to Canada in the summer of 2014, she decided to sign up at GoodLife Fitness and started off working with a personal trainer three times a week. When she wasn’t at the gym, Abdiaman would go walk circles at the track behind her house in Toronto, sometimes jogging.

“That very quickly became easy for me. I started jogging for 15 minutes and not feeling tired. Then I wanted to do a race.” She ran her first 5k in the fall.

“I remember finishing that race and feeling such a sense of accomplishment: I have done this, I have managed to turn my life around, I’ve found something I love.”

That 5k was followed by a half-marathon and a marathon. During that process, she also became a personal trainer herself, and began working to help others change their lives. She now sees that running not only strengthened her physically, but mentally as well. “It’s the one thing that has taught me to ref lect on my failures and the stresses of everyday life and see them as small obstacles,” she says. “It’s helped me lift myself from the lowest, darkest places.”