It took six months of training for me to finally muster the courage to join a race: the Fifth Avenue Mile in New York City, one of the most iconic road mile races in the world. Runner’s World editors participate in the media heat every year, and I had been training consistently enough that I felt ready to join my coworkers and represent the brand. I slogged through agonizingly slow and terribly humid long runs. I clomped ungracefully down even the gentlest of hills. At around 145 steps per minute, my cadence needed some serious work. All of this I knew. And yet, for the first time in my adult life, I viewed myself as a runner. I signed up, then I sent the event sponsor, New Balance, my shoe size.
It took about a week for the company to send me a gratis pair of highlighter yellow FuelCell Rebel v5s—the same ones everyone in the media heat received—in my usual women’s 8.5. It was August, about a month out from the race; the weather was finally cooling off, and I was uncharacteristically calm. This was just for fun, after all, and I only wanted to accomplish two things: relish the beauty and chaos of the city and finish in under 9 minutes. The new shoes looked badass compared to my other trainers, and I savored the thought that I’d be matching all of the other Runner’s World editors. I slipped them on, laced up, and headed outside for a rainy six-miler in the dark.
It took about 30 seconds of running to realize I was scrunching up the toes of my right foot. I knew it was about half a size bigger than my left, but that was never a problem in size 8.5s. I’ve broken my toenails before in pointe shoes and kept dancing, I thought to myself. I’m not turning around for this. Pain, as I had come to learn over the years, wasn’t a warning; it was part of the deal.
It took less than a mile to start hearing the faint, rhythmic, and almost metallic-sounding pop that I would mistake for a metal thumb tack. I hit pause on my Apple Watch, thoroughly investigated the tread on the soles of my shoes, came up empty-handed, and mentally shrugged. Maybe I didn’t really hear that? Maybe it’s the aglet of my shoelace flopping around? I unpaused the watch and kept running.
It took three miles to start feeling the dull pain in my kneecap, like it was slipping and sliding out of place. It was less of a pain sensation and more like the physical manifestation of nails on a chalkboard. Maybe these shoes are too small, I finally conceded. But I had just turned around and had three more miles until home. No way am I walking home in the pouring rain. I’m a runner, damn it!
It took the next morning’s descent down four janky flights of stairs in my Civil War-era apartment building to realize something was unmistakably, undeniably wrong. With each step, my right knee felt like it was pressed against an angle grinder. The friction and swelling were undeniable. I could almost feel the sparks flying as my knee became inflamed and hot to the touch. Down the final few stairs, I hobbled and limped, favoring my left leg.
It took that one nasty six-mile run in a pair of ill-fitting shoes to complete my injury. I made an appointment with a physical therapist, who told me I had developed the ever-dreaded patellofemoral pain syndrome—runner’s knee—and explained there’s a good chance I’d been wearing other ill-fitting shoes all along, even if they hadn’t bothered me as acutely. And that this specific run in this specific pair was simply the final straw for my knee, the culmination of months of poor biomechanics.
It took another six months of angrily slogging through strength training exercises from my PT and complaining about my injury to anyone who would listen before I would be cleared to run again. Seven months before I tried. Eight before I decided to figure out where it had all gone wrong. That clicking sound I’d heard during that rainy run? My body wasn’t tolerating the shoe—and in fact had even been compensating for it, I learned after calling John Vasudevan, M.D., medical director of the Penn Medicine Running and Endurance Sports Program and a medical adviser for Runner’s World. “The experience of running in general is one of compounding errors,” he told me. Whether your shoes are too loose or too tight, it’ll cause you to run differently, to change your foot strike.
It took me up until the writing of this story to figure out that this all began due to my ego. But no pair of shoes will make you a runner. You know what will, though? Listening to your body and abandoning a run if you need to. And asking for help.
It took me until last month to walk into my local running store for a proper fitting and see the folks Vasudevan calls the “shoe doctors.” I visited my neighborhood Philadelphia Runner location, where I learned that I’m actually more of a size 9.5 if I’m accommodating my bigger foot and still leaving enough space for swelling and foot expansion. Liz Pagonis, the company’s chief marketing officer, told me that it’s extremely common for people to run in the wrong size shoes. It wasn’t just me. What a relief. She added that the name of the store—running store—often intimidates people, preventing them from getting help. “They come in, and they put their hands up, ‘I’m not a runner,’” she says, to which she answers: “Cool, but you wear shoes, right?”
It took a not-insignificant amount of humility to recognize that I’ve lived in this body for over 30 years, but I still have much to learn about how it works while running. It’ll take a lifetime and then some to completely figure it out. Possibly, I never will. But as with so many things, the first step toward improvement required me to leave my ego at the door. To realize I didn’t have to earn permission to call myself a runner. I already was one because I kept showing up.
It took me a hair over 8 minutes to run that Fifth Avenue Mile, all the while wading through a tide of pain. I still can’t believe I pushed through and raced. I want to shake my past self, tell her to be less stubborn. To put the shoes aside if they don’t fit. Part of being a runner, I’d tell her, is having the wisdom to know when to quit.
Before joining Pop Mech, Courtney was the technology reporter at her hometown newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied English and economics. Her favorite topics include, but are not limited to: the giant squid, punk rock, and robotics. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, her black cat, and towers upon towers of books.
