A Cadence of Pain

I failed my first Marathon while training on Runna.

But it wasn't Runna's fault.

At the LA Marathon last year, I did not finish. I stopped after 18 miles. My legs were in pain. My heels were in pain. I was afraid of rhabdomyolysis. But there was a hidden problem I didn't think about... you guessed it: my running cadence (see the title). But more on that later.

For a bit, I blamed Runna for my marathon failure... but it really was on me. I got suckered into thinking that Zone 2 runs were the only thing that mattered. So I ended up doing every run as an easy run to build my longevity and endurance for the race. I was training a single work system, but didn't challenge myself outside of that work.

Big mistake.

So I quietly dropped my other (tempo, hills, etc) runs. Just easy miles, all the way to race day. Felt smart at the time, but It wasn't. I'd cut the one part of the plan that was going to actually help me.

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So after a recent long run where I felt that heel pain again, I thought... something is wrong that I'm not examining. So what changed my running? Fixing my cadence. I always figured cadence was a lagging indicator, not something I'd need to train. Turns out going from a low-160s cadence up toward 170+ cuts the impact force on your joints with every step. My heel pain that had been building for months? Almost entirely down to that.

So the moral isn't "trust the plan, not the internet." The internet is where I found the cadence fix. It's that no single source, whether app, blog, or coach has the full picture of your body. You're the only one running in it.