Half a mile can feel like an eternity when you’ve never run before and Al Williams had to be reined in.

“I had to ask him to slow down or he was going to hurt himself,” said Catherine Burns.

It’s something that hardly ever happens in Beat the Couch, the ten-week running programme she started four years ago.

But the 47-year-old was fitter than most.

“I’d been going to the gym during my lunch hours but I wanted to take up something I could do any time,” said Mr Williams, who joined the programme in February. Its promise is that participants will be 5k-fit within ten weeks.

“My wife Vanessa tried Beat the Couch the year before and loved it, so I wanted to give it a go.”

Surprisingly, he hadn’t enjoyed running as a child in Virginia.

“My father was in the military,” Mr Williams said. “When I was a teenager, he’d go running and take me along for company.

“I really didn’t like the way my legs hurt after or the way my feet felt pounding the pavement. I played baseball, but I wasn’t athletically inclined as a teenager.”

He was surprised when Beat the Couch coaches told him he had good running form.

“I said, ‘Really?’”

He was devastated when he pulled a hamstring two weeks before the programme’s finale, a 5K race. Runners are playfully tasked with beating a couch on wheels; he was the first male across the finish line this May, in 24min 56secs.

“That was the hardest thing,” he said. “I had to stop training for a week. I thought it would set me back.”

He’s now looking at other races.

“My resting heartbeat is lower,” he said. “My doctor is impressed.

“I sleep better when I exercise. Now, I find I’m not getting so tired keeping up with my three children.”

It’s a message Ms Burns, a nutritional therapist, is constantly trying to get across.

“From a disease management perspective, doing some exercise regularly is important,” she said. “You don’t have to be a weightlifter, or run a 10K or a marathon. Getting out there and doing 30 minutes of exercise three times a week makes a real difference to your disease risk.”

Wolete James insists she “wasn’t a runner”. She only signed up for Beat the Couch because she’d had success with Ms Burns’s sugar detox programme.

“I lost 30lbs with her help, so I thought I’d try this,” she said.

For moral support, she took along her daughter Amiya and her sister Asede Lottimore. The eight-year-old was a little frustrated that her mother wouldn’t let her run ahead.

“I ran at the back of the pack,” said Ms James. “And Amiya was too young to run along the road on her own.

“I felt such a strong feeling of accomplishment when I finished. I was so proud. I felt like I was on a high. Amiya gave me a big hug.”

Theresa Mason had tried running before, but it didn’t stick.

“My friend called me the day before registration and asked if I wanted to do it,” said the 55-year-old. “She figured this would be an incentive; in a group there is more pressure to keep going.

“There were people running hugely faster than us, and others slower We never felt intimidated.”

Ms Mason was shocked to find she was actually enjoying herself.

“I never dreamt that I would,” she said. “It was fun.”

She finished May’s 5K in 35:50.

“It was rainy and I hadn’t ever run the whole thing before, even in the practice runs,” she said. “I had always stopped and walked a little. It was a major accomplishment to say I could run the whole way.”

She is now looking at taking the programme a second time, with season ten kicking off on Monday.