Lessons from 25 Years of Running (and 13 Years of Strength Training)

By: Michelle Pohle

I’ve been running for 25 years, long enough to have done it wrong a lot.

Long enough to have chased paces that didn’t matter, ignored injuries I shouldn’t have, and learned the hard way that longevity in this sport isn’t about who can push the hardest. I’ve also spent the last 13 years strength training, CrossFit, hybrid training, coaching athletes, and that completely changed how I view running.

Because here’s the truth:

Running alone didn’t make me better at running. Understanding my body did. And unfortunately, I learned some of that by blowing out my knee running my first full marathon.

TRAINING INTELLIGENCE: Stop Running Blind

Your watch doesn’t know everything

We live in a world where your watch tells you everything: your pace, your heart rate, your recovery score, your readiness for the day. It’s all right there on your wrist, neatly packaged and easy to follow. And while that technology is incredibly useful, it’s also created a problem: we’ve stopped listening to our own bodies.

Devices like Garmin are built on algorithms that rely on generalized data. They can estimate, predict, and trend, but they can’t actually feel what you’re going through. They don’t account well for the real-life variables that impact performance, especially for women. Hormonal fluctuations alone can significantly change how a run feels from one week to the next. Add in life stress, poor sleep, or accumulated fatigue from strength training, and suddenly that “easy run” your watch prescribed doesn’t feel easy at all.

From a physiological standpoint, your Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) is still one of the most accurate tools you have. Your brain is constantly integrating signals from your cardiovascular system, your muscles, and your nervous system in real time. It’s processing far more information than any wearable ever could. That internal feedback loop is incredibly sophisticated, and when you learn to trust it, it becomes one of your greatest assets as a runner.

So here’s the bottom line: if it feels hard, it’s hard. No matter what your watch says.

Set real goals (or you’ll just stay busy)

“Going for a run” is not a plan, it’s an activity. And while there’s nothing wrong with getting out the door and moving your body, it’s important to understand that your body adapts based on specific stressors. If you don’t give your body a clear reason to change, it won’t. It will simply maintain where it is. That’s how human physiology works. Progress requires intention.

If your goal is to get faster, your training needs to reflect that. Speed doesn’t come from just running more miles, it comes from exposing your body to higher intensities in a structured way. That means incorporating interval work that challenges your VO2 max and tempo runs that sit right at your lactate threshold. You still need a foundation of easy aerobic volume, because that’s what builds the engine that supports everything else.

If your goal is to last longer, whether that’s a half marathon, marathon, or just feeling stronger deep into your runs, you need a different emphasis. Progressive long runs train your body to handle time on your feet, while also building mental resilience. Fueling strategies become critical, as your body needs to learn how to take in and use energy over extended efforts. And muscular endurance, often built through strength training and sustained efforts, becomes the difference between fading late and finishing strong.

This all comes back to a foundational concept in exercise physiology: the SAID principle, or Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands. Your body adapts specifically to what you ask it to do. If the demand is vague, the adaptation will be too. No clear goal means no clear direction, and without direction, progress stalls.

Get a coach

I coached myself for years and that’s when I found myself getting hurt the most. Not because I didn’t care or wasn’t trying hard enough, but because I kept making the same mistake over and over again: I trained based on how I felt emotionally, not how I should have been training physiologically. If I felt good, I pushed too hard. If I felt behind, I tried to make up for it. If I was frustrated, I forced intensity. There was no real structure, just effort layered on top of effort, without a clear plan for adaptation or recovery. Eventually that catches up to you.

A good coach changes that completely. They bring objectivity into a space where it’s really hard to be objective on your own. They manage your intensity distribution so you’re not living in that gray zone where everything feels kind of hard, but nothing is truly effective. Most runners tend to go too hard, too often, which leads to burnout or injury instead of progress. A coach also understands how to apply progressive overload without breaking your body down. And maybe most importantly, they help you stay grounded when you’re too close to your own training to see clearly.

From a physiological standpoint, the majority of endurance gains come from aerobic work, roughly 80% of your training should live there. But most runners do the opposite. They push too many runs into moderate or high intensity, chasing the feeling of working hard instead of training smart. That imbalance is exactly where injuries, plateaus, and frustration tend to show up and it’s also where having a coach makes all the difference.

INJURY & DURABILITY: This Is What Actually Ends Running Careers

I blew out my knee in my first marathon, and I have always had “good knees”. This is the kind of lesson most runners only learn the hard way.

It was the City of Oaks Marathon in Raleigh. If you’ve ever run it, you know it’s not an easy course. Rolling hills that just keep coming. The kind that don’t look intimidating at first, but slowly chip away at your legs over time. By the later miles, those hills aren’t just hills anymore, they’re stress multipliers, and I wasn’t ready for that.

Not because I didn’t train or I didn’t want it enough. This was a lifetime goal. I wasn’t ready because I didn’t understand what I was asking my body to handle.

When you run, you’re absorbing roughly two to three times your bodyweight with every single stride. Over the course of a marathon, that adds up to tens of thousands of repetitive impacts. Now layer in hills. more force on the way up, more eccentric loading on the way down, and the demand increases even more. It’s not just endurance at that point. It’s structural resilience.

What failed me that day wasn’t my cardio. My lungs were fine. My engine was there. It was my structure. My hips weren’t strong enough to stabilize under fatigue. My hamstrings and quads weren’t prepared to handle the eccentric load of downhill running. And my overall training hadn’t actually prepared my body for the cumulative stress of 26.2 miles on a hilly course.

That’s the piece most runners miss.

Your cardiovascular system adapts quickly. Within weeks, you can feel fitter, faster, more capable. But your connective tissues, your tendons, ligaments, joint structures, they adapt much more slowly. They require consistent, progressive loading over time to truly get stronger. You feel ready long before your body actually is and if you push into that gap, where your fitness outpaces your durability, something eventually gives.

For me, it was my knee.

I finished the race thanks to a sweatband tied around my knee, but I learned a humbling lesson in proper training.

Protect your hamstrings and hips

If I could give every runner one piece of advice, it would be this: protect your hamstrings and your hips, and don’t skip the mobility work that allows them to function the way they’re supposed to. Your hips are your engine, driving power and forward movement with every stride, while your hamstrings act as your brakes, controlling and decelerating your lower leg so you can move efficiently and safely. When those systems aren’t working together, something else has to pick up the slack. That’s when your knees start taking on more load than they should, your lower back begins to compensate, and your stride gradually breaks down.

From a biomechanics standpoint, your glutes are responsible for hip extension, this is where your power comes from, while your hamstrings play a critical role in controlling that movement, especially during the swing phase of running. But strength alone isn’t enough if you don’t have the mobility to access it. Tight hip flexors from sitting, limited hip extension, restricted hamstrings, and poor ankle mobility can all prevent you from getting into the positions you need to run well. When mobility is limited, your body will find a way to compensate, and those compensations are often what lead to overuse injuries.

That’s why the foundation starts with restoring range of motion. Prioritize opening up your hips with movements that target hip flexor length, glute activation, and rotational control. Spend time working on hamstring mobility (not just passive stretching, but controlled movement through range). Address your ankles so your stride can function efficiently from the ground up. Then, once you have access to that mobility, you need to build strength on top of it. Single-leg RDLs, hip thrusts, split squats, and eccentric hamstring work are all incredibly effective. They build the kind of strength that translates directly to running durability.

This is the unsexy work that most runners skip, and it’s also the work that determines whether you’re still running five, ten, or twenty-five years from now.

PERFORMANCE: What Actually Makes You Better

Strength training is not optional

This is probably the area where my perspective has changed the most over the last 13 years. I used to think strength training was something you added in if you had time. Now I see it as non-negotiable if f you want to run well and keep running long-term.

From a performance standpoint, strength training directly improves running economy, which means you use less energy at the same pace. It also increases force production, allowing you to generate more power with each stride. This becomes especially noticeable when you’re climbing hills or trying to kick at the end of a race. And maybe most importantly, it improves your ability to tolerate load. Running is repetitive stress, and strength training builds the resilience needed to handle that stress without breaking down.

Research consistently shows that runners who incorporate strength training improve performance without needing to dramatically increase mileage. That’s a big deal, especially for athletes who are already balancing a lot. You don’t need to live under a barbell or train like a powerlifter, but you do need to be strong in the ways that matter: lower body strength to produce force, core stability to transfer it efficiently, and single-leg control to handle the demands of running one stride at a time. This is where hybrid athletes really stand out, they’re not just efficient movers, they’re durable. And durability is what allows progress to compound over time.

Treadmill vs. outside running

Treadmills are a really valuable tool, especially if you live somewhere like Minnesota where winter can make outdoor running tough for months at a time. They allow you to control your pace precisely, reduce variability in impact, and get quality work in when conditions aren’t ideal. There’s a place for that, and it can absolutely make you a better runner.

But it’s important to understand what the treadmill doesn’t give you. It removes wind resistance, flattens out terrain, and eliminates the small, constant adjustments your body has to make when you’re running outside. Those micro-adjustments require additional neuromuscular coordination and energy. That’s why running outside often feels harder, even if the pace is the same. If you’re training for a race that takes place outside you need exposure to that environment. The treadmill can build your fitness, but the outside world is where that fitness gets tested.

Find enjoyment in it (because maybe you’re not a racehorse)

Find enjoyment in running because not everyone is built to be a racehorse. Some runners thrive on speed, competition, and chasing PRs. They love the intensity of a 5K, the edge of discomfort, the constant push to get faster. Others settle into rhythm, longer efforts, and the quiet satisfaction of just continuing forward. They’re not chasing the podium, they’re chasing the process. And both types of runners are valid.

I remember very clearly when I was just coming back to running postpartum, rebuilding from the ground up, when a running store employee casually asked me what my weekly mileage was. I told him. He looked at me and said, “That’s it?” It stuck with me, not because it was malicious, but because it exposed how easy it is to feel like you’re “not enough” in a sport that constantly celebrates more. More miles, more speed, more volume. But in that moment, what he didn’t see was everything behind those miles: recovery, healing, lack of sleep, the slow rebuilding of strength and stability. That was enough. It was exactly where I needed to be.

There’s a lot of pressure in the running world to always be improving with faster splits, to add more miles, to sign up for longer and harder races. Progress is great, but when it becomes the only measure of success, it starts to strip away something important. Because if every run is about performance, it’s only a matter of time before motivation fades. You can’t stay in a constant state of pushing without eventually burning out.

Enjoyment is what keeps you consistent. And consistency is what actually builds endurance over time. Not one perfect training block. Not one breakthrough race. It’s the accumulation of miles, weeks, and years of showing up, even when it’s not exciting.

Some days you’ll feel incredible, like everything is clicking and you could run forever. Those are your racehorse days. But there are just as many days where everything feels heavy. Your legs don’t cooperate, your pace is slower than you want, and mentally you’re just not in it. Those are your donkey days. And those days matter more than you think, because long-term runners (the ones still doing this 10, 20, 25 years later) aren’t the ones who only show up when they feel good. They’re the ones who learned how to keep going when it doesn’t.

Final Thought

25 years ago, I thought running was about pushing harder, and for a while that worked. But over time, through injuries, setbacks, and a lot of trial and error, my perspective shifted.

Now I understand that running isn’t about who can push the hardest in a single moment, it’s about who can keep showing up, year after year, without breaking down.

Longevity is the real goal. That means training smart instead of just training hard. It means lifting weights to build strength and resilience, not avoiding it because you think it will slow you down. It means fueling your body properly so you can recover, adapt, and perform, not just survive your workouts. It means protecting your joints, your connective tissue, and your overall health so that you’re not forced to the sidelines by something preventable. And above all, it means continuing to show up, even when motivation dips or life gets busy, because consistency over time is what actually builds a strong, capable runner.

The truth is, I couldn’t fit everything I’ve learned into one blog post. There are still so many lessons, from hybrid training, from strength work, from balancing running with real life, that continue to shape how I train and how I coach. But if there’s one thing I hope you take away from this, it’s this: the goal isn’t just to run fast right now. It’s to still be running decades from now.