When we’re training hard, something’s gonna hurt. The whole point of training is to break our bodies down to build them up, so being 100% pain-free is simply not going to happen. Maybe you wake up with a sore heel every morning or hamstrings that like to complain when you push a little too hard on the track. Maybe you run home and strap the frozen peas to your knees or more » Read more

When you have run for years without injury, and then get sidelined due to (frankly) your own stupidity…. Well, it sucks. I can’t sugar-coat it. I have been running for fifteen years.  I have been (to my schedule’s ability) training and marathoning for eight years.  I am not a huge mileage beast like some of our Salties, as I have a full time+ job, 2 kids with busy schedules and more » Read more

When I first started running, I believed two things that turned out not to be true:   First, that running would make me thin, and second, that there is no such thing as a bad run. Filthy, vicious lies, both of them. First:   Running, in and of itself, will not make you thin, not without an accompanying reduction in calories, a sacrifice I’m apparently unwilling to make past 11 a.m. on more » Read more

Every injured runner hits rock bottom. Sometimes it takes several false rock bottoms before you hit your real rock bottom. It’s hard to know what real rock bottom is until you’ve started to climb back out of it. It’s one of those things that you can only know in retrospect. I think it takes hitting that real rock bottom to accept the realities of the injury and to start moving more » Read more

Hindsight is 20-20 as they say. Now I can look back at the previous months and even years and see how I built up a tolerance to pain and how the pain slowly built up so that it went virtually unperceived for a long time. By the time New Year’s Eve rolled around I was in pain always. Every run I was dealing with a tight upper right leg that more » Read more