Where We Started
Written by Filsan Abdiaman
This is a project dear to my heart. For the longest time, I was searching for love everywhere but from within. This led to numerous bad decisions. I did not know how to love myself, and I was going about searching for love not knowing that loving myself is all I ever needed to do. From personal experiences, some of the challenges I believe women will face not knowing how to love includes:
Depression
Social anxiety
Insecurity and low self-esteem
Disordered eating habits/Eating disorders
After my last race of the year in 2016, I came up with the idea for “Project Love Run”. I wanted to merge my two life objectives, namely running and inspiring women. With the initiative, I wanted to offer women a safe space to talk about matters of the heart.
Running helped me find self-love and so I wanted it to do the same for other women. At the same time, I wanted to provide a setting for women to meet other women who they could connect with and relate to—sharing running as a common ground. The perfect recipe for all of this I decided would be a monthly run-to-brunch, where women could run together and share stories, offer advice, listen and learn from each other.
I wanted to host short runs (allowing for all levels of runners), followed by brunch at a healthy eatery in the city. Thus building and forming healthy habits, encouraging physical activity, particularly running, as a means to overcome life stresses related to romance/heartache and/or body insecurities.
With the project my goal was for women to be able to find combined solutions to womens issues and/or life stressors, while at the same time inspiring and supporting each other. More significantly, I wanted PLR to remind women of their worth—make them feel strong and loved. A reminder that each one of us is valuable and worthy of love at a time where lovelessness is so pervasive in society.
Runaway Brides
On October 31st, 2016 (night of Halloween), I used the theme “Runaway Bride” to officially kick-start ProjectLoveRun. The idea was to encourage women to get rid of all the negativity associated with modern day romance and reclaim control over matters of the heart. Emphasizing the transformative power of love (using my personal experience of running and finding self-love).
Focusing on the complications that arise from the advances in social dating apps and how online dating has somewhat complicated our opinions of each other and our sense of self, the discussions we had on that run touched on some of the negative impacts of online dating and a woman’s perception of her self-worth. We talked about how easy it was to swipe a bad partner away and yet how hard it was to deal with heartache and negative self-worth.
The theme was a “rebellion” against the culture of lovelessness and all the cultural uncertainty surrounding how to love, what it means to love and be loved and most significantly, how to love oneself.
The goal was to use the runaway bride to symbolize the idea of running towards something greater— a greater love, between individuals or love for oneself.
The night ended with us having dinner and wine, toasting to each other, feeling very supported and loved.
— Filsan
