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For almost as long as he can remember, Wayne Patrick Sheeran has suffered from severe social anxiety.

"Throughout my life I had this inner fear of people talking about me, making fun of me. I wanted to hide away," he says.

Among other things, the toll it took on his sleep was acute. Some nights, he only slept two or three hours. "I wasn't able to relax all night," he remembers.

But since February, he's been getting six to seven hours of solid sleep almost every night. One big reason, Mr. Sheeran says, is that, for the past four months, he has been running a twice-weekly 40-minute circuit, weaving through downtown streets here, over the Johnson Street Bridge, along the water on the Galloping Goose trail and back. And he's been doing it alongside a couple dozen other people.

The group Mr. Sheeran runs with, Every Step Counts, is like any other running group, save one difference: The majority of its runners are dealing with serious personal challenges, from mental-health issues to homelessness to drug addiction.

Sandra Richardson, the executive director and CEO of the Victoria Foundation, a non-profit organization that assists with community development, was inspired to start Every Step Counts after she read about a similar program in Philadelphia called Back On My Feet. A runner herself, Ms. Richardson thought Victoria's kilometres of running paths and year-round good weather made the city an ideal fit. "Victoria is a running capital," she says.

The Victoria Foundation gave a grant to the Resources, Education, Employment & Support network to get the project going. The program's co-ordinator, Gillie Easdon, was hired not as a trained professional, but on the basis of her enthusiasm for the project, her passion for jogging and the fact that she is a resident of downtown Victoria. Shortly after being hired, she put notices up in shelters and community centres and started talking to social workers working in the community, urging them to give the option to their clients.

"We encouraged people to come out and try it for themselves," Ms. Easdon says. "I would say, 'If you don't like it, you don't have to come back.' "

The program got under way in February with a group of 12 participants. That number has now grown to 30.

The group meets at 2:45 p.m. every Tuesday and Thursday. First-time runners are offered a pair of gently used running shoes - donated by one of the volunteers, who owns a shoe store - and any other gear they need to participate. Runners then break off into smaller pods that run at speeds according to the various fitness levels of participants. When they return, Ms. Easdon, who runs with the group, leads yoga-based stretches before they all snack on healthy meals she prepares.

For many of the participants, the program is a welcome escape from the difficulties of their daily lives. But Ms. Easdon is careful not to try to act as counsellor or social worker.

"There is no psychobabble here," she says. The volunteers treat the participants solely as runners, which allows them to identify as something other than people with personal challenges.

That kind of thinking has Drew Barnes excited. Mr. Barnes, an occupational therapist and co-ordinator of the Royal Jubilee's psychiatric day hospital, runs programs where individuals take part in exercise regimens such as walking or weightlifting, and he sees the Every Step Counts program as a stride out from under that umbrella.

"It creates the next step for clients to move beyond the mental-health system into the community system," he says. "We actively market the program [to our clients]."

Mr. Barnes is also blunt about his feelings regarding the psychological benefits of exercise: "On the most basic level, [it] allows you to interact in a more effective way with your world: You feel more alert, you feel more connected to your community, you have the endurance to walk and get your groceries - you have the energy to interact."

Research have increasingly shown a link between mental health and exercise. "Everyday I'm sent an avalanche of papers on studies about exercise and its profound effect on mood, anxiety, depression, learning - all those variables that play into mental health," says John Ratey, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.

He cites a study at Duke University in which a group of patients was prescribed exercise as a treatment for depression alongside another group that was given the antidepressant Zoloft. "Those who exercised were shown to have a quicker recovery and feel less depressed than the other group."

Ms. Easdon can attest, at least anecdotally, to those benefits. "Some of our recruits are reporting hearing less voices in their heads," she says.

Mr. Sheeran likens it to "getting to touch a bit of gold."

"You don't want to go home," he adds, "because it just feels so good."

With the word out among the community, more and more runners are joining the program. Ms. Easdon is now being forced to consider how to manage the growth. "With getting bigger," she says, "the downfall is that the intimacy and 'organic-ism' we had at the beginning is a little bit threatened."

For example, she says, "some people with social anxiety don't want to be in a room with 30 or 40 people."

Still, Ms. Easdon knows the program's success is a good problem to have. And she figures any potential friction dissipates after a little sweat. "You've got to try really hard to hang on to your crappy mood after the run."

Special to The Globe and Mail