MOVEMENT IS MEDICINE

Published: 18/06/2026, By: Alex Courbat

For most of her life, Yasmin Evans was certain of one thing: she wasn’t a runner. That belief stayed with her for years, almost like a quiet fact she never thought to question. Then one night changed everything. What followed wasn’t just a shift in fitness or routine, but a journey through recovery, community and self-discovery that would reshape her as a person. This is Yasmin’s story, the story of why she runs.

If you have ever listened to Heart Radio late at night in the car or caught a voice drifting in and out on a Saturday afternoon when the signal flickers just enough to keep you tuned in, you will have heard Yasmin Evans.

She is a broadcaster and a personality, someone who always seems to find exactly the right thing to say at the right time. Confident, quick, funny, the kind of person who can hold a room without trying. She gives the impression of someone entirely comfortable in her own skin. And for the most part, she is. But there was one part of herself she never quite believed in. Sport. Or, more specifically, running.

Growing up in Manchester, Yasmin never saw herself as athletic. That identity belonged to other people, including her best friend Lucy, a talented runner who spent her weekends training with a local running group coached by her dad. Yasmin joined them once. It did not go well. She turned up in a pair of Kappa poppers, struggled to keep up and, by her own admission, faked an asthma attack so she could stop. That was enough running for a lifetime.

After that, sport didn’t completely disappear though. It just evolved into something that required as little movement as possible. Goalkeeper in netball. Short bursts in relay races. Anything that meant she could take part without really having to run. The joke became that the only thing she’d ever run was a bath. People laughed. So did she.

But underneath the humour was something more complicated. Yasmin has lived with ectopic dermatitis, a chronic, inflammatory skin condition, for most of her life, and that shaped how she experienced her body in ways others did not always see. It is not just about the physical symptoms. It is the way it sits in your head, especially in situations like changing rooms or exercise, where you become hyper-aware of your body. She describes it as a constant battle. Your body on one side. You on the other. Both trying to find a way back to each other. In that context, movement did not feel freeing. It felt exposing.

There was something else, too. Looking back, she realises she was afraid of failing. Somewhere along the way she had convinced herself she simply was not good at sport, and after repeating that story for long enough it became part of who she was. Running belonged to other people. Athletic people. Not her. That assumption would stay with her for decades.

Then, in 2023, everything changed. She was near Liverpool Street in central London, walking with a friend in the early hours while trying to get home, when she was attacked by a group of men. It was sudden, brutal and completely unprovoked. The injuries, especially to her knees, were serious enough that for a while she needed crutches just to walk. But the impact went far beyond that. It stayed with her in quieter ways too, in the body as much as the mind.

Afterwards, she did what many people do. She carried on. Not trying to forget what had happened but trying to get on with life and deal with whatever surfaced along the way. Recovery was slow, and her body held onto more than she realised. 

Then, a few months later, an opportunity landed in her inbox: a chance to run a half marathon for Choose Love, the humanitarian aid charity supporting refugees and displaced people around the world. By then, her knees were still strapped. Walking long distances was uncertain. Running, by any sensible measure, was off the table. Which was exactly why she decided to do it. “Now my body was telling me, actually, you physically can’t,” she says. But she refused to accept that. The attack had already taken enough. She was not about to let it dictate what came next.

Her partner, a physiotherapist, promised to help her rebuild properly. Friends rallied around her. But the biggest shift was internal. It became less about whether she could run a half marathon and more about proving to herself that she would at least try.

So she made herself a promise. “We’re going to do this.”

A friend, Josh, better known as Josh Jogs, helped reinforce that belief. Not with training plans or pace targets, but with the simple conviction that she could get there. “All I needed was faith that I could do it,” she says. “I didn’t need to be the fastest. I just needed to know I could go over that start line and then go over that finish line. That’s all.” What started as recovery soon became something else.

For years, Yasmin had thought of movement as something uncomfortable, something to avoid, something she simply was not built for. Training forced her to rethink that. The more she ran, the more she began to understand her body rather than fight against it. Not just her injuries, but her psoriasis, her energy levels, her limits and strengths. Movement became medicine. Not because it fixed everything. Not because it made difficult things disappear. But because it taught her what her body needed, what it could withstand and what it was capable of becoming.

Race day at the Royal Parks Half Marathon felt bigger than sport. The route through Hyde Park in autumn has a way of softening the city, with golden light through the trees and the Serpentine sitting still in the background. Yasmin arrived underprepared by any normal standard. No real warm-up, barely eaten and fuelled by a single Percy Pig she had been carrying in her pocket.

Did that stop her? No. Nothing could.

She cried at the finish, properly. Not just because she had completed a half marathon, but because everything she had spent months carrying seemed to arrive at the finish line with her. Running had become a place where things surfaced. Anger. Grief. Relief. Pride. Things she had not always found words for had finally found a way to come out.

Four months later, she found herself standing on another start line, this time in Barcelona. The difference was remarkable. If the Royal Parks Half Marathon had been about proving she could do it, Barcelona was about discovering that she actually loved it. She smiled most of the way around. The woman who had crossed the finish line in London simply trying to survive the experience was gone. In her place was someone who trusted her body in a way she never had before.

Even now, she still cannot quite believe the transformation that happened. She says she is still shocked she runs. Still in awe of it. As though she has somehow wandered into a life she never imagined belonged to her.

That is not the only freedom Yasmin found in running. There was another kind, too. For years she had felt self-conscious moving her body in public. After the attack, that feeling only intensified. Running slowly chipped away at it. Somewhere between training runs and race days she stopped worrying about who was looking. Her shoulders relaxed. Her breathing opened up. She stopped shrinking herself.

That is why she describes running as both confrontation and liberation at the same time. Confrontation with fear, self-doubt, old stories and difficult memories. Liberation from the limits she had quietly accepted.

A few months later came the London Marathon. Twenty-six point two miles. She trained mostly on her own, following plans and building mileage week after week. On race day she followed the famous blue line through Greenwich, past the Cutty Sark, over Tower Bridge and along the Embankment. She finished it.

The euphoria, the pride, the sore legs – she experienced it all. But then came a question she had not expected. What next? For the first time, there was no next race. No training plan. No finish line waiting in the distance. Without a goal ahead of her, she found herself asking a different question: Did she actually enjoy running, or had she simply enjoyed training for something?

So she posted something simple on social media: Does anyone want to come for a run? No pressure. No pace. No expectations. Just meet up and see what happens. People responded. Run Real was born.

Her run club is very different from the structured environments she once avoided. It is for beginners, for people who do not see themselves as sporty, for those who are figuring it out as they go. People arrive with no background in running and often no confidence in it either, and that is exactly the point.

Yasmin knows that feeling better than most. She knows the stories people tell themselves about what they cannot do. She knows the voice that says you are not sporty enough, fit enough, fast enough or experienced enough. She knows the moment a few kilometres into a run when your mind starts negotiating with your body. And she knows what happens when you keep going.

This autumn, seven members of Run Real will line up at the Royal Parks Half Marathon. Some of them have never run a half marathon before. Some had barely run at all before joining the group. They are raising money for Choose Love, the same charity that started Yasmin’s journey.

That full-circle moment is hard to ignore.

The race that once represented the beginning of her own recovery now marks the beginning of somebody else’s. She will not be running with them this time. She will be on the sidelines instead, doing what she has always done best: encouraging, holding the space and making people feel like they can do more than they think. The difference is that now she does it knowing exactly what it takes.

For years, Yasmin believed the story she had told herself. That she wasn’t sporty. That she wasn’t a runner. That people like her stood on the sidelines rather than crossed finish lines. Then she ran a half marathon. Then another. Then a marathon. But that was never the biggest transformation.                   

The biggest transformation was the way she came to understand what happened after that night in Liverpool Street. For a long time, it would have been easy to define that night by what it took away. Her confidence. Her sense of safety. Her ability to move freely through the world. Instead, the pavement made her discover things she never knew she had. Strength. Resilience. Community. Joy. A new relationship with her body.
Eventually, she arrived at a conclusion that still surprises her. “Nothing was taken from me that day,” she says. “I gained from it.” Not because what happened was good. Not because it needed to happen. But because refusing to let it define her led her somewhere she never expected to go. Back to herself. Not the version of herself she thought she should be. The version that had been there all along.

The little girl in Manchester who faked an asthma attack to get out of a running session. The woman who spent years convinced sport belonged to other people. The woman standing at the start line of a half marathon with strapped-up knees, determined to prove her body wrong. They were never different people.

They were all Yasmin. The only difference is that now she knows something none of them knew back then: she can do hard things.