Nine years ago, in my first year of running, I did a six mile run with a dull ache in my hip that had been there since mile one, and I remember feeling almost proud of myself for finishing anyway. I told a clubmate about it afterward like it was a small victory. She didn’t say much, just gave me a look I understand a lot better now than I did then.
How I Used to Think About Small Pain
Back then, I had a fairly simple rule in my head: if I could physically keep moving, the ache didn’t count as a real problem. Sharp, sudden, obvious pain, sure, that would have stopped me. But a dull ache, a tightness, a general soreness that didn’t get worse mile over mile, all of that got filed under normal and pushed through without much thought. I genuinely believed that pushing through that category of discomfort was just part of what running asked of you.
I want to be honest that this belief wasn’t harmless. It’s part of what led to the bigger injury that eventually took a full year of running away from me. I’m not saying every small ache I ignored back then led somewhere bad. Most of them didn’t. But the habit of not paying attention was the same habit that eventually cost me something much larger.
What Changed My Mind
It wasn’t one single moment that flipped a switch. It was more that after losing a year to an injury I’d waved off in its early stages, and then losing more time than I wanted to a second, smaller injury I also waved off, the pattern became impossible to keep ignoring. I’d made the same mistake twice with two different injuries, and at some point I had to admit that wasn’t bad luck, it was a habit.
I remember sitting with that realization one evening, going back over both incidents in my head, and being a little unsettled by how similar the shape of them was. Different body parts, different years, same basic story: a quiet early signal, a decision to keep going anyway, and more time off in the end than either injury would have cost me if I’d paid attention sooner. That pattern was the thing that finally got through to me, more than either injury on its own.
How I Treat a Small Ache Now
These days, if something feels off at the start of a run, I actually pay attention to it instead of running on autopilot past it. I notice where it is. I notice whether it changes as I keep moving, whether it’s the same on both sides, whether it’s still there the next day. I’m not diagnosing anything when I do this. I’m just collecting information instead of ignoring it outright, which is a small shift but it’s made a real difference in how early I catch things now compared to how I used to operate.
Sometimes that attention means I cut a run short. Sometimes it means I don’t. I’m not going to pretend I’ve got a formula that tells me which is which, because I don’t think one exists that would actually apply cleanly across different aches, different days, different bodies. What I have is a much lower threshold for taking something seriously than I used to.
I’m Not Saying This Is the Right Call for Anyone Else
I want to be clear about something here. This is my own shift, built out of my own two injuries and my own particular history of ignoring things I shouldn’t have. I’m not saying anyone reading this should treat their own aches the way I treat mine, and I’m genuinely not comfortable handing out a rule about when to stop or push through, because that’s not something I think belongs in a blog post. That’s a conversation for a person and whoever they see about it, not a stranger on the internet.
A Recent Example
A few weeks ago, I felt something small in my calf about two miles into a weekend long run. Old me would have finished the run without a second thought. This time I slowed down, paid attention to it for the next mile, and when it didn’t change or get worse, I kept going and finished normally. It turned out to be nothing. But the difference wasn’t the outcome, it was that I actually looked at it instead of running past it without noticing.
What This Isn’t About
I don’t want this to read as some tidy story about becoming a wiser, more careful runner who’s got it all figured out now. I still get things wrong sometimes. I still occasionally decide something is nothing when I’m not entirely sure, and I won’t know until later whether that call was right. What’s different is that I’m at least making the call on purpose now, with my eyes open, instead of not making one at all.
Nine years in, I’ve stopped expecting myself to have a perfect system for this. Bodies aren’t that predictable, and neither, honestly, am I. Some weeks I pay closer attention than others. What I do carry with me now, more consistently than I used to, is a basic respect for the fact that small signals sometimes mean something, and that ignoring them by default was never actually the tougher choice, even though it felt that way to me for a long time.