For the Love of the Grind by Sara Hall

Author:Sara Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

12

Maximum Mobility

DECEMBER 2022

THE PHOENIX SUN STREAMS THROUGH the gym window and onto my back, already oppressively warm at 8:00 AM. I am climbing stairs to nowhere and have been for almost two hours, as evidenced by the puddle of perspiration beneath me. When the steps of the stairmill get too slippery from sweat, I hop off and onto the next machine, quickly so as not to let my heart rate drop, and continue the climb. There’s rarely anyone else in this gym wanting to use one of these machines anyway.

I glance down at my watch and I’m delighted to see my heart rate soaring into the high 170s—higher than it would be on most of my hardest training runs. It’s been three and a half months since I’ve gotten to do one of those, and I miss it every second of every day. Truthfully, I hardly feel like myself without running.

Eminem’s words bark at me from my earbuds and drown out my breathing: “And when your run is over, just admit when it’s at its end…”

Maybe mine was. I have been working tirelessly with abundant help from my longtime chiropractor JB, the most talented practitioner in our sport. But every time I try to run, at the ten-minute mark, my IT band flares. The iliotibial band is a dense section of fascia that runs along the outside of the leg to help stabilize the knee during movement, and it is a site of common overuse injury for runners. Unlike a broken bone, which will eventually heal with proper treatment, when the IT band is injured, there is no concrete finish line. It could be weeks, months … but it could also be years.

The first time I tried this machine was in the midst of a sacral bone injury in December 2018. This injury is going to lead to your breakthrough, I felt God telling me amid my discouragement. At first I plugged away on the spin bike, my go-to whenever I was hurt. I’d cycle through repeats of thirty seconds on, thirty seconds off, to correlate with the choruses and verses of techno songs, and kept a large stash of my favorite candies to consume during the “offs” as both fuel and reward for the monotony. But one day as I dragged myself back into the gym, the towering stairmill caught my eye. I decided to give it a try. I only managed to last fifteen minutes before my quads flooded with lactic acid and I collapsed onto the handles. This could be good—really good, I thought. I started implementing it into my training, and sure enough, it ended up being one of the factors that led to the big breakthrough I had in the Berlin Marathon in the fall of 2019, when I took more than four minutes off my personal best.

As helpful as the stairmill has become in my training, it has always been a side dish to the main course of running, for good reason. Here in

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