I have had a few running woes as of late as well. My long term goal was to do a marathon in the sub 3 hour mark. I have only done marathons at the end of a tri – I have done sub 4, but not too much below the 4 hour mark. I was holding my weekly mileage at about 25 to 35 miles per week for some time. My job requires quite a bit of international travel, so that number was getting disrupted quite a bit. Some weeks would be as little as 0 and some up to 35 – this whole time I was keeping my 5K at sub 18 min. Well, I found out the hard way this is not really maintainable for me, especially over time. About 6 months ago I noticed a pain in my left foot at the beginning of a run – after a mile or 2 the pain would go away. As time went on the pain lasted longer – until it would not go away the entire run.

Next stop was the Doc – couple Xrays, nothing, and then a bone scan – walla – a stress fracture. So I have stopped running for the last 2 months. I am going to start again in the next week or so. But this time I will focus on form and shorter distances and only ramp the mileage up for specific events.