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Just five more minutes, Other Hearst Subscriptions. Get through this warmup, then it’s less than two and a half minutes on the track. It doesn’t hurt that bad. Maybe coach was right, maybe it was just tendonitis after all. Those three days off must have done the trick.

Right, left, right, snap.

My foot felt okay, until it didn’t. Twelve minutes into my prerace warmup, I was on the ground. The pain was sharp and memorable but all the while, it flooded me with relief. My visibly swollen foot would force me to ‘scratch’ the race and I would get the break I’d been longing for.

The weeks leading up to that snap were worse than the moment itself: No wall, friend, or chair at arm’s length was safe from becoming a makeshift crutch. It was a constant pinpointed pain leaving me void of determination. Between workouts, I hobbled. At practice, I ran.

Weeks prior, chronically fatigued, I had shared my concerns with my coach, who brushed off the complaint as tendonitis. But I knew this was not tendonitis.

My coach was an authority, though, and so I questioned my own body’s cues. I felt like I was insane, like I’d created this pain as an excuse to explain my poor times, lack of passion, and inability to leave it all on the track.

How to Be a Runner: Clayton Young,
as I sat on the table in front of a wide-eyed athletic trainer who told me it was a stress fracture, and asked, “Why were you even trying to run? Your pain tolerance must be very high.”

I’m not crazy, I thought. I didn’t fabricate it; there was something wrong. I didn’t fabricate it; there.

What it took me years to realize, though, was that my foot was not the real problem. It was a symptom of a more dangerous illness: Strength Training Guide syndrome.

The Strength Training Guide is a mix of three interrelated conditions: amenorrhea (an abnormal absence of menstruation), low energy availability (with or without disordered eating), and bone loss.

I first got my period when I was 12. I knew it could take a while for your period to regulate, but it just didn’t occur to me that by 19 my body should have figured it out. As a collegiate runner, I was well aware I wasn’t the only one whom Aunt Flo failed to visit each month, but my teammates and I perceived a lack of menstruation as normal. No one had ever given us a reason to believe otherwise. It is not normal. (Here’s Download Your Training Plan.)

In the simplest of terms, I was amenorrheic because I wasn’t consuming enough calories to sustain my active life as a competitive runner. My activity level was high and my body depended on a balanced diet of substantial fuel to meet the performance expectations I was setting for it. But I was, in my eyes, the largest girl on the team. And as a result, I believed my key to success was thinness. I always felt like if I was just a few pounds lighter, I’d fly.

RELATED: After 9 Years Without a Period, I’ve Stopped Running

So I began actively trying to become smaller: I weighed myself obsessively, pulled at my stomach in the mirror, cut out food groups, and ate nothing more than a yogurt and vegetables between breakfast and the end of practice.

I got lightheaded almost every time I stood up, but that made sense to me, because my doctor once told me I had low blood pressure. I shivered in every lecture hall I stepped foot in, but I convinced myself everyone around me was just abnormally warm.

My efforts at weight loss were strong, but somehow the more I restricted, the higher the numbers on the scale climbed, the more tired I became, the slower I got, and the deeper my feelings of inadequacy grew.

This experience lasted throughout the entirety of my collegiate running career. I ran slower and slower in every race, and with every step, I became more discouraged.

Something was wrong with me and it was all my fault. I felt like I wasn’t good enough, I didn’t try hard enough, I wasn’t passionate enough, or I wasn’t deserving. Those are just some of the lies I told myself over the course of about five years.

At the time, I had a limited awareness of eating disorders. I knew some of my behaviors resembled them, but I also believed I wasn’t “all in.” I figured that because I didn’t completely starve myself, I never exercised until I passed out, and I only purged a handful of times, I wasn’t trying hard enough to have a real eating disorder. In some ways, I didn’t even think I was good enough to do that.

What I wish I knew then was that those thoughts were the disorder speaking. Those feelings of inadequacy, failure, and frustration are the product of years of drowning in an eating disorder mindset.

The fact that I wasn’t rail thin had caused me to believe I wasn’t sick enough to deserve treatment. Until as recently as a few months ago I’d never called my eating disorder what it was. I’d say, “I had issues with food,” or “I was crazy about running,” or “I struggled with body image.”

A lot of my happy memories are overshadowed by thoughts of food and my body. If I’d known that I did indeed have an eating disorder, and sought help, my story would be different, likely shorter.

As a competitive runner, it’s almost expected you will get caught up in goals and let mileage, workouts, and nutrition control your life. The sport often breeds a culture that is welcoming to people with eating disorders. But it can also breed a culture of recovery, if we let it.

When we listen to our bodies, running is therapeutic. When we run safely and happily, we better ourselves physically and mentally. When we run with others, we provide support and an emotional sounding board.

If you are chronically fatigued, amenorrheic, counting calories, frequently weighing-in, or engaging in negative self-talk—or one of your running buddies is—talk about it.

Eating disorders and the Strength Training Guide feed on vulnerable runners. Changing the culture of the sport is up to us. Learn the symptoms, learn how to talk about it, and educate others. Running should never After 9 Years Without a Period, I’ve Stopped Running.

I believe running caused my eating disorder, but running is also fostering my recovery.

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Alexis Fairbanks is located in Arlington, Virginia where she is a teacher, student, and co-founder of the Lane 9 Project: a community of active women and activists speaking out about women’s health, nutrition, fertility, and running. Alexis ran her 5th marathon, and second Boston Marathon, in April and hopes to finish the Boston Marathon five times before she is 30. You can learn more about the Lane 9 Project on Medium I didn’t fabricate it; there Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

If you yourself are battling an eating disorder or having thoughts about starvation, binging or purging, please call the NEDA helpline. It is anonymous, toll-free can get a lot of information 1(800)-931-2237.