علا اسعد، حكاية طويلة مع الرياضة والركض

My story with running: this is how I started running, and this is how I developed and kept it up. My name is Ola Sami Asaad; I’m a nutritionist, businesswoman, and athlete. You can follow my pages dedicated to nutrition on the following social media platforms:

Facebook: Quality of life

Facebook: Primrose

Instagram: Ola Sami Asaad

Youtube: Ola Sami Asaad

The Beginning

I started playing sports at a young age; my parents enrolled me in a local tennis team when I was eight years old, I quickly learned the game and excelled at it, to the point that I was called up to join the Jordanian national team at age 11. I represented my country for six years until I turned 17. The following year, when I turned 18, I retired from the sport and switched to working out at the gym and doing some running on the treadmill.

Years after graduating from college, having navigated the ups and downs of life and my career, and gained experience in the business world—and driven by a conviction I’d held since childhood that women are capable of doing everything men do without compromising their femininity—I decided to take up kickboxing. I was thirty-one at the time, and I excelled at it just as I had in tennis, to the point that the club I played for nominated me to represent the Jordanian national team at the World Kickboxing Championships. After some objections and negotiations between the club and the federation—due to my advanced age as an athlete—I was finally called up to the Jordanian national team. I competed in the World Championships and won the silver medal after an extremely thrilling final match, in which I came very close to winning the gold. I was thirty-five years old at the time.

My involvement with running began when I took up kickboxing; I started running medium distances of four to five kilometers once a week, My goal was to strengthen my leg bones and muscles in order to improve my performance in that sport, as well as to maintain my weight, with the aim of staying in the weight class I used to play. I actually started to enjoy running; along with kickboxing, it reinforced my belief that women—whether Western or Eastern—are capable of achieving everything they dream of and aspire to, and that if anything stands in the way of their success, it is only their subconscious mind. So I started sharing my runs with my friends on social media to encourage them to pursue their dreams. That was the seed that sparked my interest in women’s empowerment, especially for Arab women.

The First 10 Kilometers

After the World Kickboxing Championship, my passion for the sport grew even stronger, and how could it be otherwise, since I’m a silver medalist at the World Championships? One day, as I was thinking about that on my way home from work, I decided to listen to a podcast by the well-known runner and athlete David Goggins, a former U.S. Navy SEAL. His talk was incredibly inspiring and even more motivating. I decided that I would go for a 10-kilometer run as soon as I got home. I felt that this would be a great way to challenge myself and break through my limits. I arrived home and immediately changed my clothes and put on Running Shoes I went out on my own, ran ten kilometers, and came back home—tired but extremely happy, since I felt that this wasn’t a short distance for a 36-year-old woman who had never run more than five kilometers before

From that day on, I decided that I would run ten kilometers every time I went for a run. As the days went by, running ten kilometers became relatively easy, and I started doing it more than once a week. I often asked myself many questions and found answers and solutions to them while I was running, whether they were related to work, home, or even my relationships with friends. Running became my way to think and reflect on life and its challenges, to unwind and catch my breath after the pressures of a hard day’s work, and my means of finding solutions and answers to my professional and social problems—or even devising new methods and approaches to excel in my field. Furthermore, running has been one of the ways I’ve used to demonstrate the strength of women to all the women around me—whether they’re relatives, friends, or even just acquaintances.