Sasha Merrill 
There have been a handful of stretches over nine years where I nearly stopped running for good, and not all of them had anything to do with injury. Some were just seasons where it stopped feeling worth it.
I spent my first year of running in the wrong shoes and clothes I chose for looks over function, and I didn’t figure out why things hurt until well after the fact.
During my recovery, my physical therapist told me something plain and direct that I didn’t fully listen to. Here’s the conversation, and the corners I cut before it caught up with me.
I have started too many long runs too fast, known exactly why it was a mistake, and done it again anyway. An honest look at a pacing habit I still have not fully fixed after years of trying.
One long run, somewhere around year four, went so badly that it changed how I run every long run since. It wasn’t the distance that got me. It was how fast I tried to cover it.
Nine years in, the reasons I keep running have almost nothing to do with the reasons I started. I used to think there had to be one steady motivation. It turns out it’s been several, changing over time.
Nine years on, I still remember how unglamorous my first month of running actually was. No big transformation, just a lot of stopping, starting, and wondering why it felt so much harder than it looked.
For close to a year, I didn’t run a single step. This is what it felt like to stop completely, sit with the not knowing, and slowly find my way back to it.
Nine years in, my comfortable pace has drifted more than I expected, especially after a year off from injury. A look at how that shift actually happened, and what I have stopped expecting from it.
Nine years in, my weekend long run isn’t the steady upward line I expected. It grew, stalled, dropped to nothing, and grew again, and that messier shape turned out to matter more than the numbers.