I’m doing a number of running events this year to raise money for Refuge. People have been so generous that I've updated the amount I'm raising from £5,000, which I reached by June, to £10,000.

None of these runs will be very impressive. I am not a very good runner, for one thing, chalking up the sort of unimpressive times that I’d have to be a real chump to boast about at dinner parties (though this doesn’t seem to stop lots of other people). I pull extraordinarily ridiculous faces (see picture) when running, especially when I’m trying to look cool because I can see someone is taking a photo of me.

I also run for selfish reasons: it keeps me sane, and ensures I can continue to fit into certain dresses from Karen Millen and Whistles while maintaining a hard-won reputation as the woman who eats all the pies.

So I am an unimpressive runner doing a series of very unimpressive running events to raise money for Refuge.

The reason you should sponsor me is that the charity I am running for really is impressive. They help women who are going through the most horrific ordeals. Every week, two women in England and Wales are killed by their current or ex-partner. And every week, another two women escape domestic abuse.

A woman who leaves an abusive relationship achieves something a million times more impressive than even someone who runs a marathon every weekend. She will have been broken by the man abusing her, not just physically, but mentally, told she is worthless and that she will not survive without him. She will believe that the physical and emotional abuse she is suffering is her fault, and that it is impossible that anyone else could ever love her. When people ask ‘why doesn’t she just leave him?’, they have no idea of the complete lack of self-esteem that a survivor of abuse ends up with. And given few of us are able to leave a building where a fire alarm is blaring without stopping to pick up our bags, the shock of walking out of an entire life, leaving everything from your clothes to even your children behind, is unimaginable.

A man doesn’t need to lay a finger on a woman in order to abuse her. Listeners of The Archers heard how an abuser can construct an invisible cage around his victim, to the extent that everything she eats, wears, and every penny she spends, is controlled, and she lives in constant fear.

The women who leave abusive relationships and rebuild their lives and their sense of self are some of the bravest women in this country. I am so proud to be running in an unimpressive and goofy way to raise money for one of the charities that helps them.

I also plan to donate money every time I get a new and fabulously unimpressive PB at parkrun. The advantage I have here is that I’m pretty slow, so each PB will still be a nice little sum of money: currently my fastest parkrun time is 24:13.

And even if you don’t donate, please look at the Refuge website’s explainer of what domestic abuse is (http://www.refuge.org.uk/what-we-do/campaigns/early-warning-signs/). You WILL know women who are either being abused or have been through this ordeal. I would love it if my useless trudging around various parks over the next year resulted in at least one conversation between two friends where someone finally opens up about the mental and physical torture they are going through.

What I'm planning to do:

29 May 2017 - Vitality London 10,000

18 June 2017 - Great Scottish 10k

25 June 2017 - Olympic Park 10k

5 July 2017 - Clapham Chase the Sun 10k

12 July 2017 - Wimbledon Common Chase the Sun 10k

16 July 2017 - Harry Hawkes 10 miles

9 August 2017 - Ulverston 10k

16 September - Kew Gardens 10k

8 October 2017 - Royal Parks Half Marathon

p.s. keen observers may notice that I'm doing all these runs in lipstick. It's partly a tribute to the work Refuge does in building up the shattered self-esteeem of survivors (lipstick is one of those simple ways of saying 'I matter'), partly because I love lipstick, and partly to annoy people who think it's their place to tell women how they should look when they go running.