As we continue with the very first Zwift Academy Run program, let’s take a closer look at some of those taking part.

Farmer’s Daughter

Victoria Cousins was born in 1973 to Wendy and Ray in the county of Dorset, UK. Her father was a farm manager and Victoria spent her youth growing up on the farm with her brother.

She was active and particularly enjoyed riding ponies and horses. She was a member of the Pony Club and took part in events throughout her childhood.

However, during her mid-teens, Victoria began developing severe pain in her knees and wrists. She was eventually diagnosed with Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis or JIV.

JIV has no known cause, hence the word ‘idiopathic’, but it gave Victoria so much pain at times that by age 16, she was forced to give up all sports, including horse riding.

Living with the Pain

As she got older, the main symptoms of her arthritis eased, but she was still left with pain in her knees. She saw numerous specialists over the years, but none were able to provide any answers or come up with solutions other than cortisone injections.

Running was impossible and even walking caused discomfort. Sometimes Victoria would be in tears simply walking downhill.

She studied Textile Design in college and moved to London and then Brighton where she met and married her husband. The strain of carrying two children over the next few years exacerbated the pain in her knees and it was purely by chance, at a routine doctor’s appointment, that a GP she had not seen before suggested she contact a particular specialist surgeon.

After 30 years of arthritis and knee pain, Victoria was finally told that her patellas needed realignment surgery.

Over the next four years, Victoria had three operations to correct the tracking misalignment of both patellas. She spent months non weight-bearing while the bones fused back together.

Cycling on Zwift

By May 2015, Victoria was at the stage where she needed to start building muscle back up in her legs. She began cycling on Zwift. She is proud to recall, in those early days of Zwift, that she would regularly claim the QOM on Watopia’s Hilly Route!

Victoria’s first proper attempt at running also came in May 2015, when she tentatively jogged one mile, simply to see if she could.

Then in December of that year, after a few months of training, she was persuaded to run a ladies’ 10k race, which she did. She loved it and her knees were no longer giving her any pain. The operations had been a success and Victoria seized the day.

Marathons and Ultras

Encouraged by her ultra running husband, it wasn’t long before Victoria entered her first marathon, returning in May 2017 to the town where she was born to run the Dorchester Marathon with her childhood friend Emma.

By July 2017 Victoria was running on Zwift. This is back in the days before Zwift Run was officially released! Running on Zwift enabled her to log more miles training for her second marathon while working and looking after two children. It was a godsend.

In April 2018, she ran the Paris Marathon, finishing in a personal best time of 4 hours 23 minutes.

By 2019 Victoria had well and truly caught the running bug. She was a regular on Zwift, even taking over her husband’s live streams occasionally. A combination of interval sessions and other workouts on Zwift along with longer, slower runs outdoors enabled her to complete not one, but four ultra-distance races by the end of that year.

According to Victoria, the highlights of that year were running the entire 36-mile circumference of Guernsey in the Channel Islands and 46 miles around the very hilly Brecon Beacons in Wales.

Zwift Academy Run

Having started with cycling in the beta period, Victoria has now been running on Zwift for three years and is currently taking part in the Zwift Academy Run program. She has demonstrated Zwift running at the UK National Running Show and now regularly live streams some of her workouts in the hope of inspiring and encouraging other women to run on Zwift and reach their running and fitness goals.

She is convinced that regular treadmill running and in particular, the workouts during the Run Academy, have encouraged her and others to run out of their comfort zone and improve their overall fitness.

Without Zwift, she says, it is more difficult to motivate yourself to get out and do the work. With the community of Zwift runners, there is always support to get you through those tough sessions and to spur you on to work harder than you might have otherwise done.