Show Up Healthy, Not Just Tough

That feels a bit different

A few weeks ago, deep into training for Superior 100, a long training walk turned into a flare-up in the middle of what was supposed to be my highest mileage block of the year. Nothing dramatic, just my body picking a spectacularly inconvenient moment to remind me it’s still in charge.

I’ve been down this road before. Not this exact issue, but this exact pattern. Something nags at you quietly for a while. You stretch it out, you run through it, you tell yourself it’s just the normal noise of training. Then one day it flares up hard enough that you can’t talk yourself out of noticing it anymore.

It took me years of running to learn that hoping my body will sort things out on its own is usually wishful thinking. Bodies don’t work things out because you decided not to look at them. They work things out when you actually give them room to do so.

The line I keep having to relearn

There’s a real difference between discomfort that’s just part of training and pain that’s your body flagging something. I wish there were a clean rule for telling them apart. There isn’t, not one I trust anyway. What I have instead is a simple check I run through now. Does it change how I move? Does it get worse instead of better as I warm up? Does it stick around after I stop? If I’m honest with myself about the answers, I usually already know which one I’m dealing with.

The tempting move, whether you’re chasing 100 miles or training for your first 5, is to tell yourself the training window is too important to lose days to something that might resolve on its own. I get the pull of that logic. I’ve followed it before, and it’s cost me more time than it ever saved.

Showing up healthy is its own kind of win.

I want to be clear that I don’t have this fully figured out, and I’m not a doctor, so nothing here is medical advice. Just one runner’s experience trying to walk the line between pushing through and backing off. Right now, that means being willing to trade a few high-mileage days for staying healthy enough actually to stand on the start line in September.

That trade is a lot easier to write about than it is actually to make. But here’s what I keep coming back to. Whether the goal is a 5-miler, a 10-miler, a 20-miler, or 100 miles through the night, the real win is standing at that start line, healthy and ready. Not injured and stubborn. A race you show up healthy for beats a training block you gutted out and then couldn’t run at all.

This isn’t just an ultra problem.

I’d bet almost every runner reading this has their own version of something they’ve been quietly managing instead of addressing. It doesn’t matter if you’re getting ready for the Willow 10 or 20, working toward In Yan Teopa, out on the trails at Trout Brook, or building toward something bigger. The instinct to tough it out is the same at every distance, and so is the lesson underneath it. Working through an injury and pushing through an injury are not the same thing, even though they can feel identical from the inside.

If you’re carrying something right now that you’ve been managing instead of dealing with, I’d love to hear how you’re navigating it. Not because I have answers, but because I think most of us are figuring this out the same way, one moment of honesty at a time. And whatever start line you’re headed for this year, I hope you get there healthy.