Running for me in 2025
Running this year has been really good for me. It’s been quite a long time since I’ve felt good pounding pavement or trails, even though I’ve kept trying. Damaging my achilles in Kyrgyzstan back in 2022, then two stress fractures since then has really made it painful and difficult. I’ve kept doing random races here and there, but chronic lower leg pain was always there. Numerous PTs have told me that I have weak Soleus muscles (the part of your calf that engages when your leg is bent 90 degrees) but I’ve always wondered if there was something else I could be doing.
Last year was a fun diversion into running in sandals: I really enjoyed this, but it ultimately ended with another stress fracture which knocked me out of running at all for three months. That was a tough time. I’ve had some light goals this year, one of which was just a nebulous “fix shin splints”. I’ve taken this quite seriously, and I just wanted to write down what I felt really worked for me this year.
For the bullet points, it’s this:
- Eat more
- Listen to non-obvious symptoms
- Run slower
- Expand your time horizons
- Do your strength work
- Lean into hiking vert
- Sleep more
- Structure
Eat More
This was a big one: It’s been in fashion to do fasted running for a little while. Back in my mid-to-late 20s I could handle this, I would just pound a few cups of coffee and go screaming out the door. This no longer works. There have been several studies linking low energy availability and an increased risk for injury rate.
Now, I either run in the afternoon (after I’ve had a chance to eat a few times) or just makes sure I have a banana or something before going out in the morning. This segues well into…
Listen to non-obvious symptoms
Previously I would go out pretty hard, quite often, with no warm-up. I started paying attention to how I felt after these runs, since they would totally drain me. I’d feel exhausted and I’d have this empty feeling: Not quite hunger, just a void, mostly in the pit of my stomach.
Obviously this isn’t sustainable, but I used to not be bothered by it. A big part of training this year has just been more time in zone 2, which means easy runs need to feel easy. If you don’t feel like you could run again at that same pace for another hour, it was probably too hard.
Theres a time and a place for The Empty Pit, but it’s not that often and if you fuel, it doesn’t happen anyway.
Run Slower
Zone 2 training, or aerobic base training, takes a long, long time. Megan, my partner, got me into running, and I used to have a much better ability to just turn on the gas and charge. I can’t do that so much anymore since I’m not racing track bikes at the velodrome.
I’ve never had much of an aerobic base, so even though I could keep up with people, it cost a lot more to do so. This year I’ve taken a conscious effort, checked the ego, and just run a lot slower.
I used to feel kind of shameful if I was going out for a run and it was slower than 8:30-per-mile pace. I’ve really dialed that back, and now I shoot for 10:00 minute miles out the door. If it’s an easy day and I’m feeling good, it’ll probably ramp up naturally to around 9:00 and stay there.
This has several benefits: I can run more miles in the week, and I feel great after every run. Running slower has let my tendons adapt much better as well, and I’m able to do a lot of easy days in the week.
Last year it would have been unimaginable to do back-to-back days of running. Now I can more or less run every day, but I try to keep it to 5-6 days per week.
Expand Your Time Horizons
Theres a lot of literature that goes something like this: You are training for a big goal, and your time before that goal is cut into blocks. Each block is specific to a certain part of achieving that goal (base, strength, specificity, whatever).
This is a very important concept: You are not trying to get the most out of yourself today. You are trying to get the most out of yourself on a certain day, sometime in the future. With this in mind: if you feel terrible, it’s not worth pushing into a potentially sick/injured state because you wanted to run a little faster today.
I think about this a lot during the week: Is what I’m doing today impacting how I’m running this week? If I go too hard, will I need to take an extra rest day when I could have been stacking on miles? I will often times take rest days to stay on top of this concept: If I have a big saturday/sunday combo, then I’ll take Friday off if I don’t feel 100%.
The entire training block is the most important thing. How much can I do this week? This month?
Do Your Strength Work
A big part of running is resisting impact. The things that do this, specific to the sport, are muscles, tendons and a bit of bone. Lower leg injuries have plagued me a lot the last few years, and usually it happens like this: We feel good running, so we run more, then our body can’t adapt enough, and tendons take on extra load because the muscles are weak. Tendons with extra load pull on the bones, and the bones get injured.
I’m not really sure if this is 100% correct, but it’s how I think about it: Injuries are the results of cascading, systemic failure.
An important part of the chain is strength: You need to lift heavy and target the things that keep you from getting hurt. One of the things I’ve focused on this year is soleus raises (seated calf raises) because I can target the achilles tendon and my weak calf muscles. This helped a ton in the early season when I was starting to ramp up mileage. I also squat and deadlift a bit, which helps in general.
Lean Into Hiking Vert
We have a hill here, Mt Sentinel. To reach it’s summit along the steep NW ridge is a 1.6 mile trail with 1900 feet of vertical gain. It is probably my favorite thing in Missoula. I’m out there pretty often. It’s broken up into two sections: The bottom steep part and the upper slightly-less-steep part.
You can’t really run the bottom part of the NW ridge (although some badasses can, I think) so it is great to work on consistent, targeted, steep efforts. I go out there and look for a certain heartrate and climb like I can hear a metronome. I keep my heels raised so only my forefoot is contacting the trail.
There are a bunch of studies out there to suggest that tendons heal and gain strength through load, but it has to be prolonged. Isometric loading of tendons with a good amount of weight has been shown to do both. Hiking uphill in this way targets your tendons isometrically because your heels are raised. It’s a great way to build strength all through your legs while also helping lagging calves.
Sleep More
I’ve started sleeping in a bit: If I feel like I need it, I do it. Oftentimes I don’t need it. Sometimes I really do. I just let my body do it’s thing, sometimes it’s 7 hours sometimes it’s closer to 9 a night.
Sleep is recovery and recovery is the hardest part of running.
Structure
This evolves, but my weekly training more or less goes like this:
Monday: Off
Tuesday: Some kind of targeted workout: Speed, power, VO2 training.
Wednesday: Easy run
Thursday: Easy run or another workout
Friday: Off or Easy
Saturday: Long run
Sunday: Off or EasyThis has a good cadence, and I can vary it based on when my next race is or what I’m trying to do. It’s also pretty sustainable indefinitely. If/when I get smarter and start upping the mileage to 50+ pretty regularly, I’ll start working in deload weeks. Until this, I like this a lot and I can do a lot with it.
I mostly wanted to write this down for myself, in case I need to stop running and start it over again. It’s brought a lot into my life this year already and I’m pretty excited every time I go out there door.
