After 6 years, 10 months, and 28 days of running every day, I made the difficult decision to throw in the towel and end my run streak. Over the past +6 years of running, I’ve considered myself lucky. Running-related injuries were few and far between for me, aside from a hip flexor strain here and a rolled ankle there.
Most of my self-inflicted injuries were caused by random exercises that put too much demand on my lower body, like weighted calf raises or quad extensions. The injury would start as a niggle that would overextend its welcome, worsening as the days progressed. Despite this pain, I soon learned to adapt, and developed a tried and true method for running in the midst of recovery: slowing my pace, lowering my mileage, focusing on treadmill workouts and going to physio. All of these remedies, mixed with a little patience, meant that I’d be on the road to recovery within the span of a month or so.
After I got back from a month-long trip to Mexico in January, I was eager to dive into training for my first race of 2024: the Sinister 7 100-miler in July. I had been running an average of 5-miles every day for a couple of months and ramped up my mileage by a lot, and quickly. I was excited to be back in Vancouver. Long runs along the seawall and days spent on the trails were (and are) mental health tools for me—alone time where I can work through my shit. Being surrounded by beautiful mountains, trees, and the ocean is a calm that I missed while traveling, and couldn’t wait to focus and work towards a goal again.
Around the second week of February, I came back from a run and my left foot felt a ping of soreness. During that run, I dusted off an older pair of shoes from the closet, so naturally, I assumed that these worn out shoes were the catalyst of the foot ache. Writing it off, I continued to run, but the pain didn’t halt. It started as a dull soreness at the bottom of my foot, and as the days progressed and I continued to run, this soreness crept to my heel and the arch of my foot. With each day’s run, I went through a similar pattern of discomfort. The discomfort would ebb and flow each mile, all snowballing into a fucking awful pain. It didn’t take me long to realize that something was very wrong, and my body was not going to let me get away with continuing the way I was.
I booked a physio appointment and was told immediately that it was plantar fasciitis: something I’ve heard many runners complain about, but not something I ever looked into or experienced first hand. Of course, before going into the appointment, I was pretty sure it was PF…Google diagnosed me first. The pain at the time was manageable and my physiotherapist said it was possible to recover while continuing to run, so long as the pain was mild. If the soreness continued to persist or got worse, he told me, then it was probably time to hang up the runners for a bit and rest. With this news in mind, I figured that because the aching hadn’t evolved to absolute affliction, I’d be a-okay.
I proceeded with my recovery plan, but the paid decided to stick around. The tenderness didn’t just bother me during my runs, but they’d accompany me for the rest of the day (and nights). Since I work a desk job, I love getting outside in the afternoon for a ~45 minute seawall walk, but when I tried to do my loop, I noticed that my foot was throbbing about a mile in. Around this time is when I started feeling the emotions that encompass my current reality: anxiety, sadness, and frustration. The daily activities I loved, that provided me with so much joy in my life, were going to need to be paused. Walking and running hurt and if you know me, then you know I’m not the type to sit still.
I decided to roll out the second phase of my recovery plan and brought my runs indoors on the treadmill, bringing down the pace, and then resting my foot the rest of the day. As the days progressed, I saw some slight improvements which made me hopeful. But then things stopped improving, and got exponentially worse. The 5-miles on the treadmill no longer felt doable so I brought it down to 6k and then to 2.5 miles, the bare minimum mileage I set for my streak.
Then something really bad happened: I started feeling pain in my other foot—the same kind of pain I felt at the beginning of my plantars a few weeks back. At first, I tried to deny the fact that plantar fasciitis was formulating in my other foot—I resolved that this pain was just soreness from carrying the weight of my other foot around. But then I felt that familiar pain, centralizing in the heel and arch, and the reality really started to sink in. I might actually need to end my streak, otherwise my injury might worsen potentially become chronic.
My friends, family and partner were worried about me. Over the years they watched, concerned, as I pushed through illness and injury to keep this streak alive. I’ve run through some pretty brutal shit: pneumonia, stomach flus, food poisoning, internal bleeding, and a third grade hip flexor strain, which I honestly have no idea how I managed because I could barely even walk at the time. I put myself in some dangerous situations, like running crazy early morning hours. I could only imagine seeing someone you love not take proper care of themselves, refusing to rest, and for what? An arbitrary goal that at this point in time was causing me more discomfort than triumph? Silly. While I’ve always known running through these things wasn’t the most intelligent choice, I was committed to my own cause and justified it to myself. Big goals meant big sacrifice. Perseverance was a marker of a strong willed character, I thought.
In The Happiness of Pursuit, Chris Guillebeau describes sacrifice as a necessity in the pursuit of a quest. He writes:
There is no “having it all” when it comes to a quest—to pursue a big dream, you must give something up along the way. Sometimes the sacrifice is apparent in the beginning, other times it becomes apparent only later on.
I knew there would be sacrifices in the beginning and I made them. I gave up performance improvements with running (which was actually a good thing), I stopped doing lower body strength training days because I kept getting injured from the load of my daily runs (which was a very bad thing). I knew I would always have to account for a run every single day of my life. It needed to be the number one priority. The biggest sacrifices that didn’t become evident until later on, years into my streak, were the changes in my personality and my ability to experience life. Running became a dictator, controlling how I structured my day, and started to affect my closest relationships and genuine enjoyment of my everyday life.
I now had a difficult decision to make and it came with heavy emotions. Would I try to continue to push through the injury, potentially making it worse (or even chronic), but maintain my streak that was coming up to 7 years or would I take some time off running and allow my body the recovery it so desperately needed? While the answer might be easy to you (just stop running, obviously), if you’ve undergone any sort of long streak in your life or maintained some prolonged ambition, you’ll know how agonizing it is to make the call to stop.
I’m not going to recount why I started the streak, but in the early days, I identified strongly with it. Running was the epicenter of my life, and provided me with meaning and purpose. It kept me accountable to myself, helped me build community and give something back (ie. the #RUN30 Challenge), fed my ego, and gave me confidence. Running has also been a grounding practice for me. It’s helped me through some of the most difficult times in my life, and is a tool that has helped me tame my anxious mind.
Accepting the reality that my streak would be ending was not easy. I resisted. I cried a lot. I laid in bed, wallowing in self-pity and complaining to everyone closest to me. My family, girlfriend, and best friend tried comforting me. They didn’t tell me to rest like most people did, but instead, they told me to look inwards. “You’ll know when the time is right,” said my amazing girlfriend. “Really contemplate the why,” said my sister. This decision had to be something I processed and came to on my own accord. No other person, albeit how strong their opinions were, could make this decision for me. I needed to really take the time to reflect, to journal, to think things through on my own. And so I did.
While it seems that the plantar fasciitis was the main cause of ending the streak, there were other reasons that were becoming more glaringly obvious over the last few years. Dating someone like me isn’t easy. I live a highly structured life, including weekends, and everyday I needed to make time for my run. The past few years, I could never just go with the flow of the day or organize my day around my mood—I needed to make sure I was getting that 5 mile run in. The actual run time isn’t a lot (it’s usually around 40 minutes), but it’s this underlying anxiety that always tells me that I need to do it.
When I was training for Fat Dog last year, I got extremely burnt out because I never took any full rest days. My coaches accounted for the streak in my training plan, and my “rest days” were going as easy as possible with my 5-milers. It was hard to put in the proper time, dedication, and be excited about my training, when I never felt like I could hit the off button. The tiredness made me moody and exacerbated the rigidness in my personality.
Last Thanksgiving, my girlfriend Brandy and I planned to go visit her parents. My family lives back on the east coast and Thanksgiving has always been a big family thing for me growing up. I’ve missed holidays with my family dearly since moving out west, and so being surrounded by Brandy’s family was something I was super excited about. The only downside was there was just one ferry time left, which was at 6:30am, meaning we would need to be at the ferry terminal for 5-5:30am. I began to complain that I’d have to get up at 2am so I could get the run in, and so we ended up canceling the trip. While I’m not proud to admit it, this was one of the many times where my running not only took priority over the more important people—and experiences—in my life, but it also left myself and my loved ones disappointed. My daily running was quite literally running the show and everyone in my life had to feel the ripple effect of it. Brandy ended up going and I met up with her later, but as to be expected, it caused some upset in our relationship.
I started reflecting on what really matters to me, and realized that my relationships were the most important thing in my life. My goals, my routines, my running had always taken precedence in the past when I was single, but I was realizing that no, these really aren’t the most important things. While my hobbies and interests take up a lot of time and make me a happy person, they’ve also have turned against me and taken over my life. The streak was a way for me to protect my running from anyone—or anything—trying to take it away. I was so scared of losing parts of myself and my individuality in a relationship that the streak became the justification for protecting my sense of identity. It warped into these weird things about control and protection, and I didn’t even realize that until I started thinking about it more.
Over the last few years, I’ve been invited to things like camping trips, cottage weekends, and have always wanted to do a meditation retreat. Instead of being excited to do these things, I was stressed because I had to figure out how I was going to get my run in. If I went on a hike last summer where I couldn’t run, I had to make sure I got in a pre-hike run in. Trust me, I know how ridiculous that sounds. I worked out before my workout. Whenever I did an endurance event, I was not only stressed about the event, but also about getting my run in the next day. It was this constant tugging feeling. I couldn’t just live and be, I always had to think about running. Over the last year, I haven’t been enjoying my running as much. I’ve had so many shit workouts and feel sore a lot more than I used to. I found myself dreading and procrastinating getting out the door at an alarming rate. I think I’m just tired. My body is tired from the years of forcing it to do things it really didn’t want to do, and my mind is tired from constantly being in this planning, forward looking state.
I stopped basking in self-pity, and instead, started to think in terms of possibility. I began to think about all the fun things I could do if the streak was over. I could take full rest days to chill out and do nothing! Wow, what a concept!!! I can actually work on lower body strength which would help prevent future injuries and make me a stronger runner. I could do more cross-training, and try new things like swimming (have you seen my new goggles?) and biking, and maybe take some exercise classes to mix things up a bit. If I plan a hike, I can just wake up and go on the hike. If I have a super early morning and need to be somewhere, I don’t need to get up at 3am. I can just take the day off and get a good night’s sleep so I actually feel good that day. I can go on a multi-day adventure like a backpacking trip. I can put my energy and effort into my workouts because I know I have a day of rest to follow. I can work on this rigid side of my personality which has negatively impacted so many of my relationships, and work towards becoming more flexible. The more I meditated on ending the streak, the more excited I became.
I was freeing myself from a self-made prison that controlled my life for so long. While I was terrified of stopping running and thought how miserable I’d be, when I decided to end it on March 9th, things weren’t as weird as I thought they’d be. I had planned to still exercise using the stationary bike and maybe slotting in some swimming for cardio, and continuing my 6-day per week strength training regimen. It didn’t feel weird at all. Over the last few weeks, running with plantar fasciitis has been painful and kinda tortuous. I dreaded my runs everyday. They were making me miserable. While I should’ve ended my streak about a week earlier when things were starting to get bad, the extra time of anxiety-inducing workouts made me feel more at peace with my decision to stop. I don’t have any regrets and am so excited to see what’s to come. I have some race plans and other goals I want to tackle, but my primary goal right now is being content with just being. Living my life and enjoying experiences, and being okay with not making progress and moving the needle in every aspect of my life. I think we could all use more days of just being.
When people ask me if I’m going to do another run streak, the answer is no. I did it, I learned a lot, I proved everything I needed to prove, and am ready to move on. Running streaks are awesome. I had a blast and learned so much about myself, but eventually they need to come to an end. The hardest part wasn’t actually ending the streak and stopping, it was making the decision to stop. I went through the stages of grief: accepting my new reality, feeling sadness and anxiety that accompanies ending a journey of several years, to processing and looking forward to what’s to come. Sometimes our lowest moments are the best opportunities to reinvent ourselves—to grow and mature, in ways we never planned for.