In the first Stride Protocol post, I wrote that discipline can sometimes be a very organised way of ignoring obvious information.

I had quite a few examples in mind.

Earlier this year I was running up to 90 kilometres a week. I felt good, I liked the training, and I was getting close enough to 100 kilometres that the number itself had started to feel important. I had a coach I trusted, I enjoyed doing intervals, and for a while I had that slightly ridiculous feeling that I was becoming very professional about all of this.

There was one evening after a stressful day at work when I went to do intervals on a one kilometre loop near the stadium. What I had forgotten was that there was a derby that night. The area was packed, so I started improvising. Side streets, detours, whatever made it possible to keep the session going.

Stopping did not really feel like an option.

That was not because the workout was especially important. I just did not really allow myself to stop. Somewhere in my head, stopping was what weaker people did. If there was any way to make the run possible, I was going to find it.

Looking back, the injury did not come out of nowhere either.

There were long runs I started with calves so tight that I had to stop every few minutes because I simply could not run properly. I recently looked back at some of those activities on Strava and could still remember the stops from the graph. At the time I mostly treated them as interruptions that had to be managed.

There was also a 15 kilometre midweek long run I wanted to do despite having a blister on my toe that made walking painful. It was dark, I had a headlamp on, and at some point I was standing there trying to patch up my foot and wedge something between my toes so they would stop rubbing against each other.

Again, the idea of simply going home barely seemed to enter the decision.

Eventually my shin hurt enough that even walking was difficult. I remember limping around on walks with the dog and checking every morning when I got out of bed whether it felt any better on cold legs.

It improved, but slowly. And even now I am nowhere near where I was at the start of the year.

I did not stop training completely. I spent a lot of time on the elliptical and tried to preserve some of the rhythm and intensity of normal training. Similar number of training days, some harder work, enough aerobic volume that it still felt like I was doing something useful.

At the same time I started reading more, listening to more coaches and trying to understand training better. There was probably a bit of control-seeking in that too. If I could not come back fitter, maybe I could at least come back knowing more. Ideally both.

I got reasonably good at making the elliptical tolerable, which is probably a separate story.

Eventually I could run again, at least a little.

And that immediately created a new problem.

Running was fun again.

Going to the gym just to get on the elliptical suddenly felt even worse than before. The drive alone could take almost as long as a short run. Then I would sit indoors, stare at a wall and arrange fans around myself in increasingly elaborate ways, while knowing that running only required putting on shoes and leaving the house.

So naturally, my first thought was that I could start training properly again.

Properly, in my head, still meant something like three threshold sessions a week with easy running in between. I knew I was coming back from an injury. I knew I needed to rebuild. But somewhere in my head there was still this idea that if I was going to train, I wanted to do it correctly.

Easy running felt almost too simple. Threshold felt like training. And I like running fast.

So I tried some of it.

During the session, it felt great. Afterwards, my tibia was noticeably more present again for several days.

That was frustrating, but it also forced me into a different question.

Maybe this isn’t a failed workout. Maybe it’s a data point.

That sounds obvious when I write it down. It does not always feel obvious when the data point means “you are not ready for what you want to do yet.”

I used to think good training meant executing the plan. Now I am trying to treat the plan as a hypothesis.

That does not mean I have suddenly become relaxed about the whole thing.

Somewhere in the middle of trying to rebuild from roughly 20 kilometres a week, I bought a lactate meter on a classifieds site.

Did I need one? Absolutely not. Was lactate measurement the thing preventing me from tolerating more running? Also no.

But I like doing things properly. If I know there is a way to measure something more precisely, part of me immediately wants to measure it more precisely. I know you can become a very good runner without ever owning a lactate meter, and I also know that it is not the limiting factor for me right now.

Still, it gave me some satisfaction to know that when the time comes, I can use it.

For now, it mostly sits there waiting for me to have enough running to justify taking it out.

I am also reading a lot. Most evenings, if I can still keep my eyes open, I lie in bed reading Marius Bakken’s The Norwegian Method Applied. I listen to podcasts about training methodology and coaches explaining how they structure running.

Part of that is genuine curiosity. Part of it might also be another attempt to keep some sense of control while my body is currently making most of the important decisions.

If I cannot train as much as I want, I can at least understand training better.

I am not entirely sure whether that is productive curiosity or just a more respectable form of impatience.

Probably some of both.

The current approach is deliberately less exciting. I am trying to build easy running volume first, see what I can actually tolerate, and only then start turning individual days into something more demanding.

I still want small doses of speed, partly because I enjoy it and partly because I do not want every run to become the same slow shuffle.

There is an old clip of the German bodybuilder Markus Rühl talking about wanting to “just feel the weight” sometimes. I am very far from bodybuilding, but I understand the sentiment.

Sometimes I just want to feel the speed for a moment and see what is still there, or what is starting to come back.

So that is more or less what I am trying to do now. Add a little volume, see what happens. Add a little speed, see what happens. Pay attention not just during the run, but later that day and the next morning. If the tibia reacts, that is information too.

That sounds much more sensible than how I used to train.

I wish I could say I had completely unlearned the old way of thinking.

I have not.

I still wake up and one of the first things in my head is how the shin is going to feel when I stand up. When I walk through the kitchen, I notice whether I could move a little quicker without feeling it. I am still debating whether I should run a half marathon I signed up for a long time ago or finally admit that skipping it might be the more sensible decision.

And 20 kilometres a week still looks ridiculous to the part of my brain that remembers running more than that on a Sunday.

The conflict is very much still there.

What has changed is that I am trying not to treat every limit as failure.

A reaction is information. A session that turns out to be too much is not proof that the comeback has failed. A plan that needs changing is not necessarily a bad plan.

Sometimes the useful thing is simply finding the current limit, then not pretending you did not find it.

I am still figuring out what I can tolerate and how quickly I can build from here. Some mornings that feels like useful information. On others it mostly feels slow.