It's (not) me, hi, I'm (not) the problem.

How internalized narratives and habits of personality can get in the way.

Over the past week, I have made a big discovery that has dramatically changed my running and how I feel health-wise. I have made a lot of strides over the past several months as I have focused on my health and worked really hard at becoming much more healthy. I felt like training was going well at the end of the summer and there were many days where I felt fit and ready to race. I had actually signed up for several races for the fall, but there was a nagging problem that just kept coming back that was dissolve my fledgling tendrils of confidence over and over and over again. I had been having pain in my hamstring insertions/attachments (where my hamstrings attach to my pelvis). I had terrible pain there at Comrades and I realize looking back, that I have had this pain even as far back as Houston (potentially further back than that but it was most dramatic starting then). It is terrible, but also confusing. It is not sharp or nagging and my hamstrings didn’t feel tight. When I would race, the pain would just be there and not get worse. It was just there. So at Comrades, I just dealt with its existence for 80+kms. It is also a weird thing. Since the moment I stopped running, it went away. My hamstrings weren’t actually tight and all the rolling and massage and PT did nothing. After Comrades, my functional medicine doc suggested it might just be inflammation stemming from one of my other issues. So I began taking the pain as a sign that I wasn’t yet healthy. Over the summer and early fall, I would have some more confidence inducing runs as I saw my health improve and I would get excited. Then I would go and try and do a workout or a specific long run and the pain would show up. It was frustrating. I blamed it on my health, I blamed it on the fact that I was just starting back to hard workouts, I blamed it on needing to do more PT. I blamed myself because if there is one narrative that is deeply embedded in my self belief system it is that I am the problem. I default to self blame so easily, I didn’t really even see it.

For all of my life, I have been told that I am a black sheep, I am a squeaky wheel, I am a delinquent, I am a rebel. All of that was told to me despite the fact that there was scant evidence that I was any of those things. When my family repeatedly told me what a delinquent I was and how awful I was when I was in high school, I couldn’t understand. I was a hard-working, perfect GPA having, basketball scholarship pursuing, rule follower. Even after I stood up against my basketball coach and put him in prison, there were members of my family who went out of their way to remind me “what an asshole” I had been in high school and the rest of my family insisted that I apologize for my behavior and do the work to repair our relationships after all of that came out. Context didn’t matter, I was the problem. As much as I questioned that throughout my life and felt like I didn’t agree with the sentiment, it is hard to keep ideas like that from taking root in your brain and in your beliefs.

I can see now that at some point it integrated into my behavior because my default mode is to self-blame in any situation. I have gotten wildly better with this through years of therapy, but is a tricky one to unstick. I believe in personal responsibility, but it has always been hard to determine what is mine and what isn’t since I was told so often that other people’s shit was indeed mine. But it isn’t. I sometimes feel like I am just sitting on the floor with a very large ball of yard trying to untangle it. I am much better about it than I use to be.I use to take responsibility for other people’s feelings and moods. If someone ghosted me, I would spend endless hours analyzing how I had failed at a friend or person or employee, instead of considering the possibility that it had absolutely nothing to do with me or my actions. If someone disliked me, I would automatically do an inventory of my own character to determine how I had failed to measure up to someone’s unknown standards. It never felt good to be treated by others like I was the villain or the problem or the delinquent child, so by judging myself as the problem first, I tried to protect myself from the pain of those judgements. But that is very maladaptive. It means I take on other people’s stuff that is their responsibility. It means I always look inside first, instead of examining the possible external factors.

But back to the hamstrings. Over this year, I have blamed this pain on myself. I must be doing something wrong, I just couldn’t see it. At the end of September, I went over to the UK to race Glasgow to Edinburgh 57 miler. I was excited to get back to racing and do it in an off the radar kind of way where I could just focus on how I felt in my body and run without pressure. I had been feeling good, workouts were going solidly good enough even though my hamstring pain was ever present come workout days. But I wasn’t worried about them. I flew across the pond, lined up optimistically and then from the beginning of the race just felt my hamstrings. I just felt like I couldn’t run normally. I blamed myself again. It was clearly because I have not run enough pavement or flat. I blamed myself for being burned out by an incident that had just happened in the sport. It was so frustrating and yet so easy for me to stop at mile 30, hop on a train and be done with the whole thing. I took the pain I felt in my hamstrings as information that I was not ready to be racing. I immediately decided that I would not line up at Javelina as I had planned to. I had been running 7:20/mile pace for nearly 30 miles, yet all I could see was that I must be doing something wrong, I wasn’t ready, I wasn’t fit. I was missing something. I cleared the calendar and decided to just focus on Houston.

Two months on from Glasgow and the pain has not changed with increased training. I am getting in good workouts, but just feel limited by the pain. It is not getting worse and it isn’t always present. I pretty much never feel it except when running. And not all runs. Last week, I had 3 really great runs. I finally felt like “YES, things are clicking” and then my workouts sucked. Well they didn’t suck, but they didn’t feel right. My workout during the week on the treadmill just felt off/wrong and with the pain. I blamed it on how I must be running on the treadmill. On Sunday, I set off for my long run with enthusiasm, having had a great run the day before. But immediately, things just felt way too hard. I simply could not run as fast as I wanted to. The pain in my hamstrings just made it impossible. I felt like my legs just didn’t work. It was confusing and frustrating because the day before and several running days of the week had felt great.

And then it dawned on me that if this were a me issue than I would have more consistent pain. The nature of the problem to come and go unrelated to things I was doing aka PT, yoga, foam rolling, being sore/not being sore, etc finally made me stop and think “are there any factors that are consistent when this pain exists?” and “were any of those factors present on the days I felt really good?”. The answer seemed so obvious all at once. I rushed home to research my theory and had my answer.

The answer was that the shoes I was wearing on my workout days (super shoes) were 8mm heel to toe drop. On my day to day easy runs when I had the pain, my regular shoes were 8 or 10mm. On the good days with no pain? My shoes were 4-6mm. I was not the problem, the shoes I was wearing were the problem. The next day I went out and ran in a pair of shoes that I had worn a lot in 2022 (when I had no problems) and viola, no hamstring pain even after 20 miles the previous day. I immediately started researching super shoes with a lower drop and ordered a bunch of new shoes. I did a workout on Wednesday on the treadmill and all of the stride issues I had been having were gone and I was able to run faster at a lower HR. I did another workout on Friday and again, things felt great.

The shoes aren’t inherently bad, they are just not right for me. But because so many people wear these shoes and love them, I figured it had to be me. I was trained to think that way. The shoes are simply interacting with my biomechanics in a way that doesn’t work for me. I had been so committed to finding the complicated reason from within that I did not consider the simple external solution.

The lesson here is that rigorous self-inventory is good. On my new podcast that will launch next week on December 1 (!!!), I argue that we need to control the controllable in our life. Personal responsibility is good. But all of those things can be done in a healthy way and all of those things can be done in a maladaptive way. I was self-blaming which is not healthy. As I move forward and use this as a teachable moment for myself, I think about the ways that I can apply it. I am starting to ask the question, “is this a me problem? Or is this you/ not my problem?” Seems pretty simple, but it is a pause before I automatically self-blame. It is progress and it is growth. And that is all we can ever hope for.

Also, if you have made it this far, I just want to say, I appreciate you! There are two things: 1) I have opened up registration for my first group coaching cohort starting in January. Register here! 2) I am opting at this time to not do Substack subscriptions, but I have started a patreon to support my work across this platform, my podcast, my YouTube, etc. Please consider joining me.