After I became a mother, I struggled to get back into running. It was hard. It was slow. I was learning how to run with a stroller, navigating naps and snacks and meltdowns. I was learning how to be a mother runner. But we figured it out, and I ended up having many fun running adventures with my daughter, including training for two marathons almost entirely together and completing two 5k races together. I ran through my entire second pregnancy, with the stroller, and felt so awesome for doing so, even though many days I was tired, sore, and struggling to maintain my goal. In retrospect, I should have given myself more grace. But I also knew I needed those miles for mental health as well as the physical movement.
Running postpartum the second time around was much easier to get back into. Except I had lost all motivation. I could NOT get myself to run more than 8 miles, even though I was signed up to run a local half marathon just 4 months after having a c-section. I wasn’t sleeping through the night, understandably. I was learning how to chase a toddler while having an infant who refused to take a bottle, meaning being too far away for too long to run was almost impossible. I wasn’t eating enough or balancing my meals out well, instead grabbing what I could when I could out of necessity. I didn’t realize I was burning out. I thought I had it all together, and I just needed more motivation.
Then the world shut down. I went into an anxiety panic, and running became my lifeline. The one thing I could get out and do, even if the rules on how to do it safely kept changing.
But my body had enough. One day I went out for a run, and less than a mile in, my legs cramped up, my feet went numb, and I could hardly hobble home, I was in so much pain. I sat in my driveway, sobbing, and called my best friend, clueless as to what was going on or why. I had plans for a big postpartum marathon comeback that got squashed, as most things did in 2020. I was frustrated, yet relieved. I had time to figure out why running was so hard all of a sudden.
I had a running coach who I had hired for this big marathon comeback, who was phenomenal in assisting me in finding the help I needed to heal. I moved to a new state and was able to get physical therapy which greatly helped my foot injury. I later found a pelvic floor specialist who connected the dots for me from my very first pregnancy to my current symptoms. I was being dry needled from my the top of my spine to the bottom of my legs. I was learning how everything was connected.
In this season of healing my injury, I also found answers in functional nutrition. I realized that my long held beliefs in and practice of intuitive eating wasn’t enough right now. My body didn’t intuitively know how much I needed to eat. My body was depleted of nutrients from the stresses of pregnancy, running, quarantine, and moving. The inflammation that resulted from my nutrient insufficiencies was wrecking havoc all through my body and manifesting in various, seemingly unrelated ways.
Nothing in the body works in isolation. The stress I was under was causing chronically elevated cortisol levels, which slowed down my thyroid and metabolism, as my body was trying to conserve energy. Stress also uses up magnesium and sodium, and I was not eating enough to replenish what my body needed. I had a lot of unavailable copper built up in my tissues due to the lack of magnesium, which led to inflammation. Magnesium is a key mineral in muscle relaxation, so it is common for those with hypothyroidism or suboptimal thyroid function to experience joint and muscle pain, carpel tunnel syndrome, frozen shoulder, plantar fasciitis, tingling in the hands and/or feet, and tarsal tunnel syndrome.
While inflammation can settle anywhere in the body and set up shop, it is generally prevalent for those with suboptimal thyroid function to experience symptoms in their extremities. Add in being a runner, where you are using your feet every day to carry out high intensity activity, and the likelihood of experiencing a foot injury is high. By increasing magnesium, decreasing activity, and managing the cortisol response to stressors, many foot related issues will resolve, though physical therapy, and manual lymphatic drainage are also a big component to healing many of these issues.
If you have experienced recurrent plantar fasciitis, joint or muscle issues, or other foot injuries that just won’t go away, it would be beneficial to check your mineral status and see what is going on in the body that is contributing to these problems. They are not something that should be coming back over and over. They are a symptom that something else is going on. And once you find that deeper issue and work to resolve it at the source, you will be able to find long term relief.
In my case, the combination of physical therapy and increasing my thyroid function, managing my cortisol levels, and helping my metabolism through nutrition helped me get back to pain free running within a year. And while I am not back to marathon level training yet, I can see it in my future now. The wait will be worth it as my body will be at it’s strongest and healthiest when I finally line up for my next race.
I always love to talk more about the topics I share in these posts, so if you have questions about the science behind any of this, how nutrition coaching and mineral testing could help your symptoms, or are just curious to learn more, let me know!
Want to learn more about the connection between nutrition, minerals, and foot injuries? Check out these resources:
