Hurt or Just Sore? A Vermont Runner's Guide to Training Through Pain

Somewhere around week nine of a sixteen-week training block, a familiar anxiety sets in. Your left knee starts complaining on the downhills. Your Achilles feels a little snug in the morning. You've got a long run on Saturday and a race circled on the calendar, and you're wondering: is this the kind of thing I run through, or the kind of thing that ends my spring?

It's one of the most common — and most stressful — questions in distance running. And the answer is almost never simple.

"Runners come in all the time convinced they either need to stop everything or push through no matter what," says a Burlington-based physical therapist who works with a lot of Vermont City Marathon participants. "The truth is usually somewhere in the middle, and it really depends on when in training you're dealing with the issue."

That timing piece is everything. An injury in week three hits differently than the same injury in week fourteen. Here's a framework for thinking about it, organized around the phases most Vermont marathoners will recognize.

Early Base Building (Weeks 1–5): Your Body Is Still Adjusting

The first few weeks of a training plan are deceptively rough. You're not running your highest mileage yet, but your body is relearning what it means to run consistently. Muscle soreness is normal. Feeling tired is normal. Mild shin tightness or foot fatigue after long runs? Usually normal.

What's not normal is sharp, localized pain — especially anything that gets worse as a run goes on rather than loosening up. Pain that makes you alter your gait is a red flag at any point in training, but especially early, when you have the most time to address it.

The good news: if something flares up in weeks one through five, you have runway. This is the time to be conservative, get an evaluation, and adjust. Missing a week of easy mileage in February isn't going to cost you your race. Ignoring a stress fracture for three months absolutely will.

Rule of thumb for early training: If it's not gone or clearly improving within a week, get eyes on it. Don't wait.

The Mileage Build (Weeks 6–11): Where Most Injuries Actually Show Up

This is the danger zone. Mileage is climbing, long runs are getting legitimately long, and the cumulative load on your body is at its highest. IT band syndrome, plantar fasciitis, runner's knee, and Achilles tendinopathy all love to make their entrance right here.

Experienced Vermont marathoners who've dealt with mid-training injuries often describe the same mistake: waiting too long because the race still felt far away.

"I had IT band issues hit around week eight one year," says a Montpelier runner who has completed Vermont City Marathon four times. "I kept telling myself I'd deal with it after the next long run. By week eleven I was barely able to finish six miles. I had to take two full weeks off and completely restructure my plan."

The key distinction in this phase is whether pain is manageable and stable versus progressing. A physical therapist can help you figure that out, but here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Is the pain worse at the end of runs than the beginning?
• Is it affecting the way you run — shortening your stride, making you favor one side?
• Is it getting worse week over week, even slightly?

If the answer to any of those is yes, modification isn't optional — it's smart strategy. That might mean dropping mileage by 20–30 percent, swapping a run for pool running or cycling, or temporarily cutting out hills (which, in Vermont, takes some creativity).

Rule of thumb for the build phase: Stable, improving pain can often be managed with modification. Progressing pain needs a pause and a plan.

Peak Training and Taper (Weeks 12–16): The Calculation Changes

Once you're into the final month, the math shifts. You've done the work. The fitness is built. Now you're mostly trying to arrive at the start line healthy and fresh.

This is also when runners tend to catastrophize every little thing — every tight calf feels like a torn muscle, every sore knee feels like a race-ending disaster. Most of the time, those fears are overblown. The taper brings its own weird physical symptoms, and a lot of what you feel in weeks thirteen and fourteen is your body recalibrating, not breaking down.

That said, genuinely new injuries this late in the game need honest assessment. The question isn't "can I run through this for another week?" It's "will running through this make it significantly worse by race day?"

A local PT who works with marathon runners puts it this way: "If someone comes in with two weeks to go and they've got mild plantar fasciitis that's been there for a month, we're managing symptoms and getting them to the start line. If someone comes in with two weeks to go and they've got a brand new, sharp heel pain they've never felt before, we need to rule out a stress reaction before they run another step."

Rule of thumb for taper: Old, stable issues — manage and race. New, sharp, or rapidly worsening pain — investigate before you commit.

The Decisions Nobody Talks About

There's a harder conversation underneath all of this, and it's worth naming directly. Sometimes the right call is to DNS — did not start. Or to drop to the relay. Or to defer.

Those decisions are genuinely hard, especially when you've trained through a Vermont winter, logged hundreds of miles, and told everyone you know that you're running. The sunk cost is real. But the cost of a serious injury — one that takes you out for months, or longer — is almost always higher.

The runners who come back strongest tend to be the ones who made the hard call when they needed to, recovered fully, and came back on their own terms. Vermont City Marathon isn't going anywhere. The course will be here next year. So will the crowds on Church Street, and the Adirondack views, and the feeling of crossing that finish line.

A Few Things That Are Always Worth Doing

Regardless of where you are in training, some habits make the injury-decision conversation a lot easier:

• Keep a training log that includes how you feel, not just mileage. Patterns are easier to spot when you write them down.
• Build a relationship with a PT before you're injured. A baseline assessment early in training gives you a much better reference point later.
• Don't self-diagnose from the internet at midnight. It's never plantar fasciitis and a stress fracture at the same time, even though it will feel that way.
• Talk to other runners. Vermont's running community is genuinely generous with experience. Chances are someone in your run group has dealt with exactly what you're dealing with.

Running smart isn't the same as running scared. It's knowing when to push, when to back off, and when to ask for help — so that when race day comes, you're ready to give it everything you've got.