In 2021, a series of surgeries interrupted my running for 18 months. Besides the accompanying physical and mental difficulties, I faced a reckoning with the sport itself and my relationship with it. To navigate the recovery process, I pieced together lessons I had learned along the way to create sustainable habits. I came out the other side a stronger runner with a better appreciation for achieving balance, celebrating the small wins, and finding satisfaction with each run.

My First Steps

With some convincing, I gave running a try my sophomore year of high school. I didn’t really understand the concept going in. Clad in the flat-soled cinder blocks I wore to school every day, I met some friends mid-run for an unofficial trial to see what the fuss was about.

Although a swimmer by training, I was quickly hooked on cross-country. The social easy runs and changing scenery were a stark contrast to agonizing over jumping into a freezing pool to stare at the bottom. I stuck with cross-country for the next three years, slowly getting more serious about running along the way.

However, I was a better swimmer than I was a runner, and I correlated being good at something with liking it. Why else would I go through brutal, monotonous workouts if I didn’t love swimming? I was objectively having more fun running, but I tried to rationalize the amount of time and effort I had put into swimming despite the growing dissonance.

Burnout

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had burned out. I had been doing serious training for swimming for as long as I could remember and needed a break. I had lost motivation, and I struggled to remember if I really ever had it or if training was just a habit I hadn’t questioned.

After high school, I mostly stuck to club sports. As I sought out team-oriented endeavors in a more relaxed environment, grueling workouts five to seven times per week transitioned into a lighter workload of three to four times per week. Instead of focusing on specific time-based goals, there was scrimmaging and games.

I was starting to find enjoyment again while freeing up more time for additional commitments. I was also forming a new view on intensity. Not every workout needed to be a trip to the pain cave. Some days could just be for fun.

My Next Steps

In grad school, I spent some time doing research in Geneva, Switzerland. I was in a foreign land on a shoe-string budget and had more time than sense on my hands. Unable to afford many of the attractions the city had to offer, I turned back to running.

Enough time had passed that I forgot the consequences of overtraining. I decided I wanted to train for a half-marathon having not run longer than five miles continuously in years. I picked an arbitrary goal time that sounded good and paired it with a training plan suggested for that time. I didn’t read about how to train, I didn’t think about the purpose of each workout, and I didn’t listen to my body. I just went full speed into training, fully focused on achieving my goal time.

I was on a collision course with a lesson I should have already learned. A mix of youth and dumb luck staved off injury and yielded a time I was happy with. But I didn’t feel how I had imagined I would. In fact, I felt worse at the end of the race than I had ever felt before. What’s more, I had found myself dreading workouts and rushing easy days to get them over with. I was feeling the same aversion and hollowness I had experienced with swimming and started to ask myself the same questions: did I actually like running or was it just something I was good at and decided to keep doing? I declared that I was done with running competitively, having ostensibly reached what I had set out to.

Burnout 2: Electric Boogaloo

In a very preventable and foreseeable manner, I had sleepwalked straight into my second bout of burnout. This time, I recognized what had happened and was able to put a name to it. I realized that my previous foray into club sports had revived a sense of enjoyment in an activity without having broader goals. Finding gratification in atelic pursuits, reveling in the process, created less pressure to perform and yielded a stronger sense of purpose day to day. A hard workout was not a puritanical journey to derive purpose out of suffering. It needn’t be an exercise in extreme delayed gratification. With the right balance and choice of workout, it could be fun.

In the following years I scaled back my running significantly. I was determined to only run when I wanted to, where I wanted to, and at the pace I wanted to. I started hiking more and mapping out runs to explore new places. After my first run-in with burnout, it took two years to recover enough to start with serious training. My second took nearly 7 years.

During that time, my relationship with running evolved. What had started as an attempt to rediscover enjoyment in the activity itself slowly morphed into something more. At times, it was a way to connect with friends. At others, it was an outlet to deal with stress. It was time I could use to listen to music or podcasts, to organize my thoughts, or just to simply enjoy nature.

Injury and Recovery

The most devastating part of needing surgeries was the lack of a cause. As humans, we crave causal explanations: a stress fracture due to overtraining, a hamstring strain from pushing too hard. Any way to justify an outcome and build a narrative around how we could have avoided it if we had changed this one thing and how we’ll know better next time. Instead, I was left to confront the unsettling truth that I had been doing everything right and yet would still need to stop running.

The first runs back were some of the hardest I’ve ever experienced, both mentally and physically. I had lost a significant amount of fitness and muscle, I was slower than I had ever been, and I had trouble running continuously. We learn not to compare ourselves to others; however, avoiding comparisons with our past selves is much more challenging. Redlining at a pace minutes per mile slower than your previous easy pace is a confidence killer. Run-walking at 5 minute intervals when you had been doing hour-long runs is frustrating.

Circumstances had changed and I had to quickly come to terms with whether I even liked running now that I was comparatively much, much worse. Despite the resentment at having regressed so much, it was still a huge upgrade from not being able to run. I knew that if I wanted to get back to the balance and enjoyment I had found previously I was going to have to accept where I was at and take it easy.

And I did. In fact, I started to view it as an opportunity to re-learn how to run. I started reading about running form, about the science of training, and about assigning purpose to each run. And while I wasn’t anywhere near my all-time bests, I learned to enjoy making small progress and to stop comparing myself to unrealistic past benchmarks. Maybe I would eventually get back to where I was, but if I didn’t enjoy the progress along the way, I would eventually burn out again.

Two and half years after starting recovery, I’m in a good place. That’s not to say there hasn’t been setbacks – I’ve had two minor running-related injuries – but I’m listening to my body. I’ve been more thoughtful about monitoring total life-stress and adjusting training accordingly. I’m not hitting lifetime PRs (yet 😄), but I’ve started racing again with local 5Ks. I’ve logged more miles this year than I ever have before, and I rarely find myself dreading a run.