This Girl Can: Hannah's story
For the past three weeks television adverts, social media posts and billboards across the land have advertised Sport England’s latest campaign This Girl Can. It’s a sassy celebration of women everywhere no matter how they exercise, how they look, or how sweaty they get.
The national charity, the English Federation of Disability Sport (EFDS) is supporting This Girl Can to ensure more disabled women can get involved in the campaign.
Yesterday Sport England’s latest Active People Survey was published. It showed that 121,700 fewer disabled people and 125,000 fewer women are regularly taking part in sport. EFDS believes that the results reinforce the importance of understanding and responding to disabled people’s needs and preferences much more effectively.
Campaigns like This Girl Can will play an important role in increasing the numbers of all active women, especially those living with impairments and health conditions.
Hannah Ensor, from Didcot in Oxfordshire, is 32 and describes herself as a “pretty active person”. She successfully combines her career as a cartoonist and busy lifestyle with keeping fit.
After seeing the This Girl Can advert, Hannah wants to encourage more disabled women to take up sport or another form of physical activity. Here she tells her story:
Hannah – This Girl Can
“In the aftermath of the Paralympics in 2012 I got lots of comments from people telling me that I reminded them of Paralympians because I’m active. No, I thought. You wouldn’t say to someone jogging along that they looked like someone training for the Olympics. It’s just a normal thing to see.
“I dance, both because I need to and because I enjoy it.”
Hannah has what she describes as “several conditions,” including one which makes it difficult for her body to regulate its heart-rate or raised blood-pressure, which are automatic bodily reactions to exercise or even alterations in room temperature. So in order to tell EFDS about her exercise regime, she has to prepare.
“Right now I’m at home, and actually at the moment I’m lying on the floor with my feet up against the wall,” she reveals. “Just so enough blood will get to my head and I’ll be fine. It’s a routine position for someone like me, with my conditions, in order to have a sensible in-depth conversation.”
Given the physical barriers Hannah faces when it comes to undertaking strenuous activity – “my body can react strangely to exercise” – some may question how she keeps fit at her local gym or in the dance class at all. But for Hannah, exercise is central to her life.
“Exercise can lead to me feeling, you could say, like I’m drunk. So that’s loss of coordination, the shakes and losing the ability to speak properly.
“But If I’m not active I’ll get a lot worse. Exercise causes immediate symptoms but they will go away again, whereas if I don’t exercise I’ll experience long-term deterioration. And I’d rather not go through that.”
This Girl Can campaign
For Hannah, there are numerous psychological benefits.
“The initial kick-starter for me doing exercise was necessity, but now I genuinely enjoy it as well,” she says.
“I love to dance - once a week for two hours. I go to a contemporary dance group that’s mixed ability, so everything from total beginners to people who teach each other dance classes. There is no right or wrong way to dance. Everyone does it in their own way and you get to use your entire body, not just one part of it.”
“When I dance I usually start in my chair and will often end up on the floor in various positions at various points, however the music takes me.
“I find it really invigorating. It’s also a team activity to which people contribute as much as they’re able, and that’s something that is so much greater than its parts.”
Hannah saw the This Girl Can campaign as it was launched on 12 January, and was pleased to see it contained a wide variety of women with different body shapes, backgrounds and levels of fitness.
“I liked the advert when I saw it,” she said. “It’s full of regular people. It wasn’t sportspeople, it wasn’t supermodels. It got the point across that exercise is for everyone, great because it’s fun and it doesn’t matter if you look a bit daft while you’re at it.”
Hannah has lived with her conditions – Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) and Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS) – all her life. It had the biggest impact on her life during her mid-twenties.
She was an active child, who enjoyed rock and tree climbing as played rugby. But the period where the doctors searched for diagnoses saw her lose her love of exercise.
“There was a period when I was a lot less active. My pelvis was coming out of line a lot, which was excruciatingly painful. We didn’t know what was going on then, so I didn’t do much exercise at the time.
“Then it took me a couple of years to build myself back up to my current fitness level. But it has definitely been worth it.”
What does Hannah feel the This Girl Can campaign will do for disabled women across the country?
“I think that some women, because we don’t see women exercising in public that often, may well feel too embarrassed to do it. So it is reassuring to see women in This Girl Can who aren’t embarrassed, who know that it is perfectly normal and they are not the only ones doing it.
“I also like the fact that it’s not full of elite athletes. It’s now nice to think that people will start thinking that disabled women participating in sport is just the same as anyone else doing sport.”
Join the conversation: follow @thisgirlcanuk on Twitter and use hashtag #thisgirlcan and 'like it' on Facebook, visit the website on www.thisgirlcan.co.uk and check out the exclusive campaign film previews. If you are an active disabled woman and have a story to tell, please contact Jimmy Smallwood.
