I Ran Sixty Kilometres Thinking It Was Healthy. It Wasn't.

For years I ran long distance. Half marathons, full marathons, and at one point a sixty kilometre run. On paper, that looks like the picture of health. In practice, it was often doing me more harm than good.

Yes, my cardiovascular health improved. But every one of those long runs put a huge amount of stress on my joints, ligaments, bones, and muscles. And here's the part that matters most: that physical stress doesn't exist in isolation. It gets added to everything else already going on in your body.

This is something I talk about with clients all the time. If your stress levels are already high, emotionally, nutritionally, even electromagnetically or thermally, then piling more physical stress on top through gruelling training doesn't make you healthier. It pushes your total load past what your body can actually handle. Add in relying on artificial glucose gels and poor nutrition during those long runs, and you're stressing the body even further while thinking you're doing the opposite.

I was convinced I was doing the right thing. I thought I was being healthy. Really, I was overloading a system that was already under pressure from other parts of my life.

To be clear, I'm not saying long distance running is bad for everyone. If the rest of your body and mind are genuinely balanced, you can enjoy long runs without it working against you. The problem isn't the running itself. It's ignoring your total stress load and assuming that because something looks healthy, it automatically is.

If you're pushing hard in one area of health while ignoring stress piling up everywhere else, that imbalance is exactly what we work through together.