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How a Debilitating Injury Changed Me As a Long-Distance Runner

It made me realize I won’t be a runner forever.

Ryan Fan
The Partnered Pen
9 min readDec 17, 2024

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Mohamed_hassan on Pixabay

As a marathon runner, on my college cross-country team, I had a great deal of extremely talented teammates. We were a Division III school where the focus was on academics over athletics. But it was commonly known that these extremely talented teammates could have run at Division I schools, but one thing held them back: injuries.

I saw some teammates spend more time injured and on the bike or in the pool more often than I saw them running. I saw some teammates suffer setback after agonizing setback, with stress fractures and medical walking boots every other week.

Almost every runner and athlete has an injury story that varies in length and severity. I, fortunately, have not suffered a lot of the injury bug. I have a smaller, more compact frame that makes my injury susceptibility lower than a lot of people. But I have had my fair share of injuries myself, being a runner for the past 15 years since middle school.

In the past few years, there have been one or two marathons where I had my calves and hamstrings seize and spasm during races. I wondered if this was due to a lack of stretching or just going out too hard past what my training made myself capable of. Sometimes, this would leave…

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The Partnered Pen
The Partnered Pen

Published in The Partnered Pen

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Ryan Fan
Ryan Fan

Written by Ryan Fan

Believer, Baltimore City IEP Chair, and 2:35 marathon runner. Diehard fan of “The Wire.”

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