Your Journey
Your words from the first week, back in April.
"Shin is feeling stronger every day."Week one — when running hurt and rest made it worse.
Where you are as an athlete. Faint is your start. Solid is now. The dashed line is your potential, what the performance phase is for.
Why the potential matters
Fewer injuries. The stronger you get, the harder you are to break. Strength training cuts runners' overuse injuries to around half, and you came in with shins that ached after every run.Lauersen et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine
Faster, for less. More strength, power and speed improve your running economy, so the same pace costs less energy and you can hold it for longer.Systematic reviews, Sports Medicine
The payoff. That durability is exactly how you build past 16k to bigger distances without the shins flaring up again.
You've cleared the rehab arc and raced. You're in the performance phase now.
6 June: you rolled your ankle mid-race — and finished anyway. A swollen left ankle on a fall, with kilometres still to run, and you got it done with zero shin pain the whole way. We've since dropped into protective ankle work — inversions, eversions, calf isometrics — and the swelling is already down. Finishing on a rolled ankle, then rehabbing it calmly, is exactly the robustness we built.
Longest run · kilometres · minimal start, all the way to a 16k race
From a first cautious 2-minute jog in April to a 16k race on 6 June — every step pain-free at the shin. The pace and distance built only as fast as the shin could take it.
4 quick questions. Tells you where to start, and how deep to go.
So I know whose audit I'm looking at.