Running to failure.
October 24, 2026
It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog, I wrote my last post about my first run back in early June but by the time it was July I’d injured myself. I’m not sure if it’s an Achilles sprain or tendinitis, to be honest I felt it in the middle of June but paid it no mind because it went away after the first mile. It wasn’t until early July when I realized how much it hurt to walk downstairs.
I watched a video from a personal trainer explaining tendinitis to a student athlete where he said something along the lines of, “he doesn’t have much issue during weight lifting, but see how he’s unable to hop on his injured foot”. Sure enough I tried to hop on my left foot and the pain was unbearable.
I didn’t get surgery and convinced myself I can recover through a collection of rehabilitation workouts trying to rebuild my Achilles’ elasticity while also strengthening the muscles around it. I looked at timelines of Achilles injuries and honestly didn’t like what I saw, even at a minimum I wouldn’t be able to run until next year.
I wasn’t a particularly good runner by any means, I can’t remember the last time I ran a sub-10 minute mile, but I loved the feelings running would give me. After the sharp pains in my legs and chest subside, I was able to enter what I assume is the “runner’s high”; getting lost in thought, having conversations with myself, my body on full auto pilot. This running stint was heavily inspired by my reading of Haruki Murakami’s memoir What I Talk about When I Talk about Running where he talked about running an average of a 10k every single day. Obviously, that average is too high for me, so instead I tried to do a 5k whenever I could. In the morning, during lunch, after work (which ended up being my favorite time to run), I hated running in the heat but found that I liked how the sun felt on my skin. My goal for the Summer was to get fit and extremely tan, similar to how I looked in high school during the tennis season.
The hard pivot of running almost every day for a month to little to no cardio made me slightly depressed. Which is normal whenever you break any kind of habit, if you don’t fill the void with something else, then a void is what you’ll feel.
It’s October now and I’ve been going on walks more. I think the thing I missed most from running was the time spent thinking, even if it was about nothing. It became meditation, emotional regulation, and when I stopped running that extra time I had for myself was gone as well. For a while I avoided long walks out of fear of furthering my injury but I feel like my Achilles is in a better place. Not 100%, nowhere close to it actually, but I’m able to hop on my left leg without much pain which was impossible a couple months ago.
I don’t know when I’ll feel comfortable enough to run again, I’m thinking sometime next year I’ll sprinkle in a half hour run here and there. I’m mostly writing this to remind myself to trust the process of recovery and to highlight the progress I’ve made towards it, even if the progress is a morning walk.