How a community running group are helping mums to wage the war on coronavirus

As a former palliative care doctor who spent two decades working for the NHS, Lally Sell is cherishing her unexpected role during Britain’s biggest healthcare crisis in a generation.

Due to caring for her autistic daughter who has cerebral palsy, she was unable to return to the frontline. Instead, the mother-of-two has been running around a small pocket of Bristol picking up prescriptions from pharmacies and delivering them to elderly residents who are self-isolating during the coronavirus pandemic.

“The first time I knocked on a door, I ran my obligatory five or six steps backwards and waved at the lady as she appeared,” says Sell, 40. “She had been cooped up in her house for a couple of weeks already and she was just pleased to see a friendly face delivering her medicine. It was a real positive human experience.”

It is one of the many ‘drug runs’ that members from a running community in Bristol have launched in response to the coronavirus crisis. Founded by Bristol mother Mel Bound in 2015, This Mum Runs is a network of over 80,000 runners all over the UK which empowers mums of all ages, backgrounds and fitness abilities to stay active.

When social distancing guidelines were introduced last month, the group could no longer organise their bi-weekly social runs, so Bound floated the idea of delivering prescriptions to the elderly and vulnerable in the TMR’s Bristol Facebook group.

“We had a bunch of women who were desperate to stay active,” says Bound, who learned how overstretched local pharmacies were struggling to ship prescriptions out to elderly and vulnerable patients. “The floodgates opened on Facebook and the response was unbelievable. Within two days, we had it set up.”

Bound jokes the group has inadvertently morphed into a drug-running cartel, but little did she know she would end up taking advantage of the service as a chronic asthma sufferer.

“I take one of the drugs which is listed on the shielding list, so I can’t go and run myself,” she says. “I normally order my medicine through a repeat prescription on an app but the whole system fell apart, so I phoned the pharmacy and asked if a TMR runner could come and deliver it. Within an hour and a half I had it at my front door.”

For Sell, the burgeoning prescription delivery service has provided a lifeline amid the claustrophobia of life in lockdown, which includes caring for her 12-year-old daughter Emily.

“I come back re-energised to face the meltdown that may well have occurred in my absence and knowing that I’m ready to provide my daughter with the stability and emotional support she needs for the next couple of days,” she says.

As a freelancer with greater flexibility than most younger mums with kids, Jo Redman, 59, was one of the first to sign up to the initiative. She clocks between three and four miles on a drug run, making sure she sticks to the stringent criteria to ensure patient confidentiality.

“All we’re ever given is the address,” says Redman. “You never know the resident’s name and they never know yours and we certainly don’t know what medication they’re getting. But it’s so heartening to get out the front door and so something so useful. It’s such a privilege to be part of.”

At a time when the importance of connectivity could not be more pronounced, TMR has also launched its first app called Run30, aimed at helping people run non-stop for 30-minutes. Each of the 24 sessions, which users can loop back to as many times as necessary, include video coaching from Bound as well as content from women’s health specialists.

“It’s a brilliant programme for people to do with their kids on a bike and it can be followed by anyone, not just mums,” says Bound. “We thought it was so important for people to carry on being active for their sanity.”

Redman, who has coached mums on the Run30 programme as one of the group’s volunteers known as ‘run angels’ is confident the pharmacy delivery service can become a long-term project. “We really are run angels now,” she says. “That term really has come good.”