Until 2015, Jessica Lovett-Murray had never run more than a few kilometres at a time. Growing up in country Victoria from the Gunditjmara and Yorta Yorta tribes, she had played team sport as a teenager, but after the birth of her son, found the barriers too great to re-engage. Having recently lost three family members, and struggling with anxiety and depression, however, she knew something needed to change. This happened dramatically when she took up a friend’s invitation to apply for the Robert de Castella Indigenous Marathon Foundation team.

“We had to do a 3km tryout and an interview. I struggled with my 3km, [because] I’d never run more than 5km and had no idea how far a marathon was,” she said with a laugh. “When I got the call and they said I made the team, I felt like crying. I think I just needed a goal to focus on. I felt I needed to do something for myself.”

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Taking up long-distance running in her late 20s, however, wasn’t easy for Lovett-Murray. To begin with, she was worried about how she would look practising for a marathon from a base of just 3km. “I never used to go to the gym and run if there were heaps of people in there. So, when I first started, I did a lot of early morning stuff, when there weren’t many people out. I was quite embarrassed in case I looked funny, or didn’t look very cool, or wasn’t fast enough.”

This aspect of Lovett-Murray’s story is a familiar story for many women. According to Victorian-based campaign, This Girl Can, 52% of women worry about being judged while exercising, and for over 40%, this feeling of embarrassment or intimidation is so strong they think it unlikely they will start at all. These numbers add up to an alarming three in five (or 60%) of Australian women who are not sufficiently active, and one in five women who don’t do any physical activity in a typical week.

For Lovett-Murray, becoming a mother compounded these existing barriers to returning to physical activity. Her son, she said, would often cry when she left to jog, which made her feel like she was a bad mother for exercising. “The first couple of months, he would cry when I walked out the door. But by the end of it, he would be like, “OK, Mum’s going for a run, and that’s OK, she’s coming back.”

“[Having kids] definitely makes it harder to get back into exercise, but if I didn’t have a sitter or he was upset, I’d just take him with me in a jogger. You can always find a way around. Sometimes I’d work out at home if I couldn’t get to the gym: I’d be on the treadmill at 10 o’clock at night, because that’s the only time I could fit it in.”

Lovett-Murray’s persistence has now paid off in a big way, having recently competed in the New York Marathon, a half marathon on the Gold Coast, and a special Mother’s Day Classic event in the company of one of her biggest inspirations: her Aunty.

“My Aunty has always been a runner, and last year, she ran her 20th consecutive Mother’s Day Classic. So I organised a group of women from our community [near Heywood], Aboriginal women, to run at her side. There were about 25 of us that ran with my 74-year-old Aunty. Seeing her out there doing it, just makes you think there are no excuses really.

“Now I organise big fun runs for the community, and each year, we select a team for the National Indigenous Deadly Fun Run. The community gets really excited about it. It’s a trip to Uluru and it’s getting them out the house, and they love being out on country running.”

Lovett-Murray’s success story is one of several chosen to be at the forefront of This Girl Can, which builds on the UK-based campaign of the same name. Created by Sport England, This Girl Can was responsible for a set of viral videos that inspired a record 3.9 million British women to get active. The key to its success, says VicHealth CEO Jerril Rechter, was that the campaign took time to dig deeper into the reasons women don’t exercise or participate in sport.

“It’s the barrier that no one has been talking about, but our foundation research really clearly showed that fear of judgement is huge. It can be defined under three areas: appearance, priority and ability. With appearance, women were worried about being judged for being too sweaty, having a red face, changing in front of other people, getting too muscular or not appearing feminine enough,” she said.

“With priorities, women felt like they were being judged for spending time exercising when they should be with family, because that’s more important. Or that they should be with friends, or studying, or working.

“And with ability, it was not being fit enough, not [being] good enough, [or] not knowing the rules. One of the things that was quite strong was women didn’t want to feel like they were holding the team back. That is why they will exclude themselves from sport.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest This Girl Can’s ambassadors pose with VicHealth CEO Jerril Rechter and Minister Natalie Hutchens. Photograph: Blue Tree Studios/Joseph Feil / Blue Tree Studios

Another of This Girl Can Victoria’s ambassadors, Lisa Schuppe, added that one of the biggest issues for women was the difference between theirs and men’s “entitlement” to space. At 53, she is a keen surfer, but has only recently taken up the sport again after her experience as a girl who wanted to surf just like her friends who were boys – but was instead treated inequitably.

“I’ve always been in the water, from when I was a young girl. But we would use surf mats back in the day, because little girls didn’t surf in the 70s and 80s,” she recalls.

“My dad had a surf ski and we would go out on that. That wasn’t cool, you know. All my boy mates had surfboards, and my sister and I had surf mats, which were these blow-up things that we sat around in the water on the waves. We’d surf just the same, but you can’t stand up on a blow-up surf mat!”

Without being conscious of it at the time, she turned her attention to body boarding, because of her surf mat experience as a girl. She didn’t think to return to surfing, until she was in her late 30s and had some friends come and stay from overseas and encourage her to take up lessons again.

Now, she says, she is grateful to be back in the water, but still keenly feels the effects of gender inequity in this space. “There’s a lot of testosterone in the water” is Lisa’s signature quote for the This Girl Can campaign. “When you’re out there and you’re thinking you’re going to get a wave, you look across and instead see a bloke going for it, so you hang back,” she says.

“You see them look around, paddling and racing to get the wave. So you feel like you can’t [go for it]. In fact just the other day, I watched a guy drop in on a young woman. And she was having a great time on the waves, until he dropped in. Look, I’m no Stephanie Gilmore. I’m really just a beginner with a long journey, but for me that just deflates me and makes me feel that I’m not as entitled to go for it.”

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As a result, says Schuppe, she no longer surfs at the “wild” beaches like Bells or Jan Juc, instead preferring to stick to Torquay. She hopes, however, that with campaigns like This Girl Can, women will “get out there and participate, and don’t take on anything external that’s negative”.

Rechter says this is exactly what the campaign hopes to achieve. “We know that if women can identify themselves in advertising and media, they’re more likely to overcome their fears of judgment. We want to empower women to be comfortable in their bodies and in public space.”