Personally, I have always loved being active and primarily enjoyed playing basketball, tennis, and lifting weights. However, in 2020, COVID put an end to those hobbies and my search for a new, 'socially distanced', activity/sport began. Like most things in life - when one door closes, another opens. That was when my running journey began.

A couple of months into running, I was catching up with a good friend who told me about a half marathon he wanted to run in Chicago. While he had participated in other races, he was struggling with finding the motivation to train. As we talked, I determined that if I committed to flying to Chicago to join him in the half marathon, he would be motivated to train. The good news - I was committed to train for my first race with a good friend. The bad news - I had 5 weeks to train and, up to that point, I had not run more than 4 miles in a week.

As a Physical Therapist, I was acutely aware of the risks of increasing activity at such a sudden rate. I had no foundation in running and understood the more efficient I was as a runner, the less strain on my body. Injury is a function of tissue overload, and since 5 weeks is not enough time to build strength, I had a higher likelihood of getting injured. I had to focus on running as efficiently as possible which led to a deep dive on running form and training. My efforts paid off, and I finished my first half marathon in just over 2 hours without injury and with just under 5 weeks of training.

While training, I often ran outdoors to take advantage of Austin's beautiful lakeside trails. But you know what I discovered wasn't so beautiful? People's running form. During my training, I watched so many people run and realized there was an epidemic of poor running form! Who taught these people to run? Oh wait, who taught me to run? Though I was a pretty good athlete and one of the fastest kids in my area, no one had ever taught me to run. Simultaneously, I was meeting and treating a lot of runners who were dealing with chronic issues. They would turn to all the temporary fixes - new shoes, stretches, run-of-the-mill strengthening - but the same, or new, problems would always return. How does someone know what muscles to stretch or strengthen? Does it really matter what shoes someone purchases when they aren't even aware of their own running form? This is when I decided to start The Run Mechanics.