Last spring, about a mile into a Tuesday evening run, I felt a small twinge on the outside of my ankle. It wasn’t much. A brief flicker of something, gone almost as soon as I noticed it. I kept running and didn’t think about it again until it showed up the next time I laced up, in the exact same spot.
The Early Signs I Waved Off
For about three weeks, that twinge showed up on and off. Never bad enough to stop a run. Never bad enough to even really slow me down. It was the kind of thing I could talk myself out of taking seriously, and I did, over and over. I told myself it was just how my ankle felt sometimes. I told myself it would work itself out. Looking back, I can see exactly how many small warning signs I explained away during those three weeks, and I’m a little embarrassed by how easy it was to talk myself past every single one of them.
This is different from the bigger injury that once took a year of running away from me entirely. That one crept up in a way I genuinely didn’t see coming until it was serious. This one I saw. I noticed it early, clearly, more than once, and chose to keep going anyway.
Why I Kept Running Through It
Part of it was pride, if I’m honest. I didn’t want to be someone who backed off every time something felt slightly off, especially after everything I’d already been through with my leg the year before. I think I overcorrected in the other direction, deciding that toughness meant ignoring small signals instead of paying attention to them. That wasn’t a lesson I actually learned from my bigger injury. It was more like a lesson I thought I’d learned and then quietly abandoned the first time it got inconvenient.
Part of it was also just the calendar. I had a long run planned with the club that I didn’t want to skip, and then another one the following weekend, and each time I told myself I’d deal with the ankle after this particular run. There was always one more run I didn’t want to give up.
There was also a quieter reason underneath the calendar excuse. I think I was afraid that if I stopped to actually look at the ankle, I’d find out it was something serious, and part of me would rather have kept running in a state of uncertainty than face a clear answer that might mean stopping again. That’s not a rational way to make a decision about your own body, and I know that now. At the time it felt less like a decision and more like avoidance dressed up as toughness.
The Weekend It Got Worse
It was on one of those club long runs that the twinge stopped being background noise. Somewhere around mile six, it turned into something sharper, something I couldn’t run through without changing my stride to compensate. I finished the run anyway, which in hindsight was probably its own small mistake layered on top of the first one. A clubmate noticed I was favoring one side near the end and asked if I was okay. I said I was fine. I wasn’t entirely being honest with her, or with myself.
Seeing Someone About It
I ended up seeing my physical therapist about it a few days later, once walking normally had become uncomfortable enough that I couldn’t keep pretending otherwise. She looked at it, asked me a series of questions about when it started and what it felt like, and gave me her read on what was going on. I’m not going to repeat the specifics here, because it was her assessment of my ankle, not a general statement about ankles, and I don’t think it’s mine to hand out as if it applies to anyone else. What she did make clear was that the three weeks of waving it off hadn’t done me any favors, and that if I’d come in earlier, we might be having a very different conversation.
More Time Off Than I Wanted
I ended up taking more time away from running than I would have needed if I’d dealt with it honestly from the start. I’m not going to attach a specific number of weeks to that, partly because I don’t think it would mean much out of context, and partly because I don’t want anyone reading this to treat my particular experience as a predictable outcome for theirs. What I can say clearly is that it was longer than it needed to be, and that the gap between what it could have been and what it actually was is entirely on the three weeks I spent ignoring something I’d already noticed.
What I Actually Took From It
I don’t think the lesson here is some tidy rule I can hand you. I still make judgment calls about small aches all the time, and I don’t always get them right. What changed is how quickly I stop and actually pay attention when something repeats more than once or twice. I used to need a pattern to get loud before I’d listen to it. Now I try to notice it while it’s still quiet, though I’ll admit I don’t always manage that either.
What sticks with me most about this whole episode is how different it felt from the bigger injury the year before. That one, I could almost forgive myself for missing, because it genuinely snuck up on me. This one I can’t explain away the same way. I noticed it. More than once. I made a series of small, conscious choices to keep going anyway, and each of those choices felt reasonable in the moment and looked worse in hindsight. That’s the part I think about now when something small shows up on a run, not the ankle itself, but how easily I talked myself past it while it was still small enough to matter.