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Navigating injury is always difficult, but doing so during a global pandemic certainly adds an extra layer of challenge.

I haven’t said I’m injured, but when you don’t run for a month because it hurts, at some point you’ve gotta call a spade a spade. Most of my past injuries have been obvious and undeniable, like stress fractures, but this one is less clear. I haven’t gone to a doctor to receive a diagnosis and I ran for a long time debating if it was an injury or if I was just sore and tight. I didn’t want to call it an injury because being home on lockdown, running was my only ounce of normalcy among the chaos and I didn’t want to give that up. 

In the late fall of 2018, I was diagnosed with a stress fracture and spent most of November and December in a walking boot. That injury healed well and by the end of January I was back to my regular weekly mileage again. As I trained for the 2019 Boston Marathon however, I started having some soreness in my hip that I now credit to being on my feet most of the day in a walking boot throwing my body off balance. I got through Boston training and the race without it being more than an annoyance after long runs and hard efforts and with the week I took completely off after the race, I felt good again for a while. I’m not sure when it came back because it was subtle, but at some point it did and I remember spending a lot of time with my double lacrosse ball to try to relieve tightness and soreness as I prepared for the Richmond Half Marathon in November 2019. After that race, I took a couple days off and continued prepping for a 5k I was running  a couple later. I PR’d both of those races and was having the most fun running I had had in a long time, but after the 5k, I finally realized my hip pain wasn’t going to resolve itself and I needed to back off a bit. I took 3 days off of running to cross train as well as taking my weekly rest day and that was enough for things to feel good again for the next couple of months. But I wouldn’t be writing this if it stuck and before long the nagging pain that was growing all too familiar was back. 

Again, I can’t pinpoint when the hip pain returned, but I had some posterior tibial tendon pain that was almost certainly related. The post-tib pain began in mid-February as I began training for the yet to be cancelled Boston Marathon. At the time, I still didn’t recognize the hip pain as a real issue but I did take a few cross training days and significantly reduced the length and intensity of some long runs to deal with the post-tib issue. That was enough to allow me to maintain my Boston training and although it didn’t feel amazing all the time, I felt that I could get through the marathon and evaluate whether more significant time off was needed after the race. And then everything closed. 

The cancellation of the Boston Marathon sucked, but for me it was definitely a blessing in disguise. By mid-March my hip was really beginning to bother me and the race being cancelled allowed me not to run a 22-miler that I probably had no business running. The pain wasn’t that bad but it was constant and that can’t be a good sign. Hindsight is 20/20 and if I had a do-over I would shut it down completely as soon as the race was cancelled, take some rest and cross train for a bit before it got any worse and I’d be happily running pain free by now. But if years of injuries have taught me anything it’s that even when you learn to rest and listen to your body, you’ll still make the wrong choice sometimes, and I kept running. As we shifted into this strange ‘new normal’ running helped to ground me. Running allowed me to spend time outside and gave me a reason to get up early(ish) and start my day. Lacking the structure of the workday, running provided some semblance of routine and I was reluctant to give that up. 

Finally, I caved. The third week of April my mileage was half of what it was the previous week. I ran like usual on Tuesday and Wednesday but on Thursday I turned around less than half a mile into my run with the sudden return of post-tib pain. I cross-trained for two days and tried to run again on Sunday, but that run proved I needed to shut things down for longer than I’d expected. Since April 20th, I have only run two 20 minute runs to check in and see how things were feeling (which spoiler, was not great either time). 

For the most part, I’ve been inside on the bike trainer cross training, but I recently put air in the tires of my very fancy bike purchased at Target so I could get outside and enjoy the nice weather. Getting outside to cross train has been a huge game changer for me. Although it definitely isn’t the same and I’m jealous of any runner I see, I’m glad I’m able to get some fresh air. 

This week, I also did something I often preach but haven’t done in a very long time. After weeks of cross-training, I finally gave myself some total rest. I was getting sick of the monotony of cross training, especially since it was primarily being done in the same room I work, read, watch TV, and eat (yay tiny DC apartments), so I decided not to work out at all for a few days and see how it felt both physically and mentally. I had just spent a week on the elliptical and I recognized that I was doing it more out of the disordered idea that I have to exercise more than anything and I felt it was important to challenge myself and take some rest even if it felt uncomfortable. Usually I take 5-7 days of complete rest twice a year, but because I haven’t run a marathon since last spring, I hadn’t done that in such a long time. I didn’t even notice how badly I needed it. I took 4 days completely off and by day 4 my hip felt better than it has in a year and I was itching to get outside. I went for a nice easy bike ride on Friday and have started getting back into a bit of routine again in the last few days. My hip is feeling a bit irritated again, but I plan to rest tomorrow and continue to monitor how things feel before I begin a return to running. We’ve had some great weather lately and I have an intense urge to lace up and hit the pavement, but I am not going to let the last month off of running to go to waste. I’m not sure when I am going to be able to get back to running normally, but I know that when I do I want to feel confident that I’m healthy and truly ready to go. 

Navigating injury is always difficult, but doing so during a global pandemic certainly adds an extra layer of challenge. I’ve kicked myself a few times for not being smarter and shutting it down sooner, but I’m trying to lend myself the compassion I would give to my athletes. We all make mistakes and beating ourselves up is never helpful. I’ve made a decision to give my body the time it needs to heal now, and that’s really all I can ask of myself. If you’re dealing with an injury right now, know you’re not alone. We’re missing so many important aspects of our life right now and not having the thing that grounds us and allows us to escape from real life for a bit is an exceptional challenge. Know that whatever you’re feeling is valid and you have people who love and support you no matter what.

Does pace really matter?

Short answer: Probably not nearly as much as you think. 

I’ll preface this with the caveat that this post is one of personal experiences as a runner and coach, not a research article. You can get some of that from David Roche and Mario Frailoi.

When runners think about a workout, what comes to mind is likely running a prescribed distance at a prescribed pace and then doing it again for a prescribed number of times. For example, in college one of my favorite workouts was 18-20 200’s every minute on the minute beginning at 35 seconds and decreasing the pace (that sounds terrible, why did I enjoy that?!). Thinking of workouts this way isn’t incorrect, but it’s also not the only way to think of them. In fact, for most runners it is probably more beneficial to toss out that pace subscription and tune in to how your body feels instead. 

Pace matters to a degree because when you’re aiming for a PR at a certain distance, you want to go into the race confident that you can hit your goal. But running race pace all the time, or even frequently, is far from the answer you need to get there. Those of us who aren’t professional runners don’t have the privilege of kicking our feet up and watching hours of Netflix to help us recover from a tough workout Wednesday or weekend long run. Instead, we have jobs, families, dogs, chores, cooking, and a slew of other life components to factor in. All of these factors, as well as sleep, nutrition, stress and weather, influence each and every run we do, and rarely (if ever), are they within our control. 

Because of the unpredictability and stressors that come with being an adult human, it’s useful to focus on effort over pace as a method of monitoring your training. Pace may feel like the end all be all, but while maintaining an 8 minute mile for 6 miles on Tuesday may feel like a jaunt through the park, that same pace may feel like a miserable slog for a 3 miler on Thursday. Rationally, you know you’re fitness didn’t up and leave in the 48 hours between those two runs, but if you’re stuck in a pace-based mindset, it can be frustrating and worrisome nonetheless. 

It sounds pretty straightforward, but I know how challenging separating pace from effort is in practice and how many runners are resistant to it. In an attempt to convince you, I’ll tell you a bit about my journey. 

I got my first GPS watch (a Garmin Forerunner 25 that required a cord to sync to my computer and seems totally ancient now) a little while after graduating college in 2013. Having been on a team my entire running career up to that point, this was my first time without a coach or running buddies. I was alone, but I was armed with (to be read with sarcasm) the wisdom and power of constant pace feedback every step of the way. As an already numbers obsessed person, I quickly found myself determining a pace I needed to run before lacing up each day and judging every run by how much faster than that predetermined pace I ran. At the time, I wasn’t really doing workouts, but with my focus on pace, I was running moderately hard to hard, every. single. day. Eventually, as I began training for my second marathon, I added in some workouts and continued to prescribe paces and force myself to hit them no matter what. I disregarded the fact that I was in the midst of a stressful first year of teaching and often sleeping too little as I tried to cultivate a social life and community in a new city. I continued on my way, running hard most days and very hard some days, believing I was on the right track because I was hitting the paces. I even qualified for the Boston Marathon for the first time, so I thought to myself, ‘this is definitely working’! 

Oh how wrong I was. Long story short, I ran my first Boston Marathon with a tear in my hamstring and was then shackled to the stationary bike the entirety of the summer. A major injury, the result of going too hard too often. Butttt I’m a runner so naturally I didn’t learn my lesson right away. Honestly, I didn’t even start to learn my lesson until over a year later, when I began working with my coach, Megan Roche. 

When I started working with Megan, one of my first workouts was “10x1minute efforts at a pace you could sustain for an hour”. So I’d think about what pace I could run for an hour in ideal conditions and head out in the heat and humidity of D.C. summer aiming to run that pace the whole time, disregarding any and all factors that would indicate I should probably slow down (for the record, you really should slow down in heat and humidity). I trained like this for a while (and still get stuck on it often) before I started to sip the Kool-Aid Megan was serving just a little bit and play around with taking off my watch or turning off the GPS for an easy run here or there. Overtime, watch-less runs became liberating and I slowly allowed myself to run slower on easy days without fear of the pace tattling on me to my Strava followers. 

Running slower on easy days was a huge first step for me and I wholly believe it was a key factor in a marathon breakthrough I had in 2018. When it came to hard, quality sessions though, my eyes were still glued to my wrist, as recently as this past September.

This fall, my job was more stressful than it has ever been and it took virtually every ounce of my physical and mental energy to make it through the school day. Because of this, I really wanted running to be going well so that I could feel successful at something. So I tried to force it. I stared at my watch as I ran workouts at 4pm when it was 90 degrees and then cried when I couldn’t keep up with the pace I had in my head. I felt defeated, slow, and ready to throw the towel. But great coaches don’t let you do that, they problem solve and get you through it. Megan’s solution for me was to turn off the GPS during workouts. I didn’t like the sound of that, but I trusted her wisdom and went for it. Admittedly I left the GPS on, but I took away the pace feedback and only looked at my paces after the workout was over. The amazing thing was, most of the time, my workouts were faster than they’d been just a few weeks earlier when I was driving myself into the ground aiming for a particular pace but I was finally running the appropriate effort rather than running too hard for the sake of a number. Over the course of the next couple months, I began really tuning into my efforts and not overextending myself to reach unrealistic goals. I did a lot of very similar long runs with bouts of half marathon effort mixed in during that training cycle and I found that one Saturday my goal race pace felt like a breeze and the following week 30 seconds slower than that was a challenge. Neither run was objectively better than the other (although I’d argue the slower one was probably better for the mental toughness aspect), the effort was similar and therefore so were the gains from it, but I finally allowed myself to run by feel and not get as caught up in judging the pace. The best part of it all was that when it came to race day, I ran about 20 seconds per mile faster than I what I typically did at the same effort in a race-pace workout (a 3 and a half minute PR), proving to myself once in for all, that it never really mattered that much what my watch said day to day.

I still have a long way to go in letting go of the pace and truly running by feel, but this morning was a proud moment for me. I got up early to run before work, which is something I don’t do often, and before I even started running, I acknowledged that my paces during my tempo and 6/4/2 minute 5k effort  intervals would be slower than my actual 5k race pace because I’m not an early morning runner and I was sure to be a bit tired. This mindset allowed me to run my workout hard but not too hard and avoid crying mid-interval out of frustration that I wasn’t hitting my ‘pace’ (which I really, really wasn’t).

Clearly, changing this mindset doesn’t happen overnight, but if I’ve convinced you to give it a shot, here are a few suggestions:

• Start with easy runs! Don’t go straight to pace-free workouts, it will probably stress you out more. Start by mapping out one easy run a week so you can leave your watch at home and just run your planned route with no attention to time. 
• Change your watch screen. I used to have time, distance, and pace displayed on my watchface. Now I have time, distance, and lap time displayed. Lap splits make workouts easy and with this display I can keep the GPS  running without constantly seeing the pace. I still like getting my mile splits, but now it’s usually to make sure I’m not going too fast on easy days! 
• Transition to time-based workouts. Instead of running 800m, 1000m, or mile repeats, run for time. If you plan on running 800 meter repeats, do the same workout with 3-4 minute intervals instead. Same workout, less room for judgment!
• Finally, get off social media/Strava if that’s behind your attachment to pace. Literally no one cares if you’re running 6 minute miles or 12 minute miles, but if you find yourself speeding up because you’re worried about what your Strava followers will think, stop running and delete the damn app right there. 

So bottom line, once again, pace sorta kinda matters, but not nearly as much as you think! 

This post was about 700 words longer than anticipated, so thanks for sticking it out and happy running!

On November 4th, I ran my second fastest marathon to date, despite some foot pain and lots of stomach issues. I finished the race slightly disappointed in my time, but proud of myself for fighting through adversity to a strong finish and even prouder for managing to have fun some fun along the way. A few hours after the race, I had done some processing and reflecting, and I decided I was content with the result of the day, but the fire inside of me was burning brighter than ever. I knew I needed to take some time off, and was looking forward to doing so, but at the same time, was eager to run again with sights set on big goals in the spring.

“You can be proud of yourself and want more out of yourself at the same time.” -Alexi Pappas

I took a full week completely off after the race before going for a 10 minute jog with my puppy one day. To my surprise (and dismay), the foot pain I’d experienced on and off before New York and then significantly during the race, had not resolved itself during my week of rest. For the first time, I realized I might actually be injured.  A week later, I found this to be true, receiving my third stress fracture diagnosis.

I experienced a range of emotions over the next few days, most significantly, frustration at feeling like I should have known better, but overall I coped pretty OK. Fortunately, a number of running injuries, including the previous stress fractures, have taught me lessons in patience. In addition, I am lucky to have a tremendous support system, including the Lane 9 community and my coach, to lean on when I felt defeated. At times I felt like it was my fault, but I knew deep down that I trained smart and treated my body as well as I could have.

Sometimes injuries just happen.

So let’s fast forward. It’s now the middle of January and I can confidently say that I am fully on the mend. Progress started slowly. Very slowly. But now I am beginning to feel like I’m gaining momentum.

It began a month ago, December 23rd to be exact, with 15 minutes of 1 minute running, 1 minute walking. Those 15 minutes were incredible. I was just so grateful and thrilled to be outside again, moving my body in the way that I love. From there, the running increased slowly and the cross-training days became less frequent. But as I began my third week of running, frustration began to sink in. I was finally starting to run continuously, without the walk intervals, but it felt slow and hard, and like I wasn’t making any progress. I was quick to get down on myself and started to wish I did not have a spring marathon on the horizon. But each time I let the doubt creep in, I forced myself to take a deep breath and practice patience. I reminded myself that I’ve been here before and chances are, I’ll be here again.  Progress will come in due time, but fitness cannot be rushed, especially if I hope to remain injury free.

I am nowhere near where I hope to be come April and honestly, I probably won’t reach peak fitness by then. But on Saturday, I had the best run I’ve has since that race on November 4th. For the first time in months, running felt smooth, natural, and dare I say…fun! I even felt a little fast again. Sunday, was the opposite and I felt slow and robotic as I surged into a strong headwind, but I kept Saturday’s run in mind. I tucked away that memory of feeling good on the run and reminded myself I’ll feel that way again soon.

I’ll have my first mini-workout this week and no matter how it feels, the fact that it’s on my schedule at all is a testament to how far just one month has brought me. I’ve still got some cross training on the schedule, but Saturdays are getting longer, hill strides are getting easier, and my pace is getting just the slightest bit quicker. Progress is slow, and it’s not linear, but damn does it feel good.