Ad copy

I stopped at 0.4 miles on a Tuesday morning in April on a paved path along the river where I had run for ten years. I had run a marathon on that same path in 2020. I had run it in 4:11. I had been forty pounds lighter and thirty-six years old. On this Tuesday morning I was forty-one. My breath had gone wrong by the third minute. The pain in my left knee had started by the fourth. I had stopped under a tree at the four-tenths-of-a-mile marker and I had put my hands on my knees and I had not been able to get them off my knees for six minutes. A woman in her sixties had passed me at a comfortable jog. She had not looked at me. I had been grateful for that. I had walked back to my car. The walk was 0.4 miles. It took me eleven minutes. I had sat in the driver's seat in the running shoes I had bought five pounds ago and I had cried for twenty minutes before I could see well enough to drive home. I want to tell you what the five years between 4:11 and 0.4 miles actually looked like. Because I had thought it was my knees. I had thought it was my age. I had thought it was the price of having pushed my body for fifteen years. It was not. I had been a runner since I was nineteen. I ran my first half marathon at twenty-three and my first full at twenty-nine. I ran two marathons in my thirties. I ran the 2020 marathon five months pregnant with my son. I ran it slow and I ran it carefully but I ran it. After my son was born I came back. I ran my first 10K post-birth at eight months postpartum. I ran a half at fifteen months postpartum. I weighed one hundred and twenty-four pounds, the same as I had at the start of the pregnancy. I was thirty-six. By thirty-seven I had gained eight pounds. I figured it was the recovery. I added another short run to my week. By thirty-eight I had gained fourteen. I cut my long run from twelve to ten because my knees had started talking. I figured it was just normal wear. By thirty-nine I had gained twenty-three. I had stopped racing. I had not signed up for the spring half. I told myself I was taking a year off. By forty I had gained thirty. I had stopped running the long path. I had stopped looking at my Garmin data because the pace was demoralizing. I would do three miles and feel destroyed. By forty-one I tried the 5K loop along the river. I made it to mile 0.4. The week of the 0.4 mile run I went to my doctor. He looked at my chart. He looked at me. He said, "You played hard for a lot of years. Your body has wear and tear. Your knees are aging. This is what happens to runners." He did not weigh me. He did not run labs. He told me to swim instead. He told me I had had a great run and that my body was telling me what it was telling me. I cried in the parking lot for the second time that week. I tried the things runners try when their bodies stop responding. I joined a Pilates studio. I went to Pilates twice a week for four months and gained three more pounds. I started lifting. Three days a week with a coach. I gained two more. I did the Couch to 5K program. I did it twice. I made it to week five both times and quit because my body felt heavier and slower at the end of every session, not lighter. I tried intermittent fasting for ninety days. The scale moved up two pounds. I tried the runner's-low-carb-protocol my old training buddy from the marathon team sent me. Three pounds up. My husband had not said anything about the weight. He had said one thing about the running. He had said, "You used to look like a person who was free out there. I miss seeing that." He had said it kindly. It had wrecked me. The thing that found me was an AI fitness coach app I had downloaded in January and had ignored for two months. It was supposed to set me a training plan. I had stopped logging workouts after the first week. In May, after the 0.4 mile cry, I went back to the app and typed a paragraph into the chat function. I told it that I had been a marathon runner. I told it I had gained thirty-eight pounds in five years. I told it I had tried every protocol and that my body had moved up the whole time. I asked it what kind of training plan I should be on. It did not give me a training plan. It said something I had not seen in any running forum or any medical office. It said that the pattern I was describing — chronic weight gain despite high training load, recovery taking longer over years, joint pain, breath collapse — was a pattern it had seen described in research on nervous system dysregulation in former athletes. It said the body, after years of training stress on top of life stress, can move into a low-grade survival state that the body cannot exit even with more training. It said that more training in that state makes the state worse. It said the work for that was not running. It was nervous system regulation. It named an app called Liven and a program inside it called the Neurobalance Protocol. I clicked the link at 11:14 PM on a Wednesday in May with a glass of water on the desk and a marathon medal in the drawer six inches from my hand. The quiz took three minutes. My Dysregulation Score was 78. I started the protocol the next morning. Nine minutes. The first one was about teaching my body that it was no longer being asked to perform. I want to tell you what is true five months later. I lost twelve pounds in the first ten weeks. I have lost another nine since then. My knees stopped talking in week four. My breath came back in week six. I have not had a five-AM panic about an upcoming deadline in nine weeks. I sleep through the night five out of seven nights instead of zero out of seven. I started running again at week seven. Not for time. Not on a plan. Just three miles, three days a week, on the path along the river. There was a 5K along that same river last Saturday. A small one. Three hundred people. I signed up at the last minute, on Friday afternoon, without telling anyone. I told my husband Friday night. He looked at me for a long time across the kitchen counter and he said, "Are you sure." I said, "I'm sure." I finished the 5K in 38 minutes and 19 seconds. That is two minutes slower than my middle school PE 5K time in 1998. I do not care. I crossed a finish line for the first time in four years and three months. My husband was at the finish. He was standing next to a woman in her sixties who turned out to be the one who had passed me at 0.4 miles in April. She did not know who I was. My husband knew. He was crying when I came across the line. He had not cried at my wedding or at our son's birth. He cried at a small 5K on a Saturday morning in October. If you have been a runner, or a lifter, or a yogi, or a woman who used to know what her body could do — and your body has stopped responding to any of it — there is a question your doctor probably has not asked you. The quiz is the one the AI coach pointed me to in May. The link is below. I wish I had typed that paragraph into the chat function the year I gave up the spring half. I would still have the years between 2022 and 2025. 💙