You love running…

…but you’re stuck at this plateau that you can never seem to overcome or the wheels always seem to fall off in your training as the aches and pains (hip, knee, IT band, feet…) or pelvic floor symptoms inevitably creep back in. You feel heavy, clunky, or inefficient in your stride, like there is something you are missing.

Sooo, let me ask you…

Are you strength training? Regularly? Consistently? With the demands of running in mind?

Strength = Resilience
Deficiencies in strength are typically a major part of pain in runners (IT band, knees, hips, pelvic floor symptoms…). Stretching and foam rolling won’t "fix" you!

Strength = Efficiency and Power
Strength will help your body to capitalize on, instead of fear, those ground reaction forces so that you can minimize energy lost with each step and improve your running economy.

For the most part at least, you know this… but you also JUST want to run. I get it!

Maybe you just don’t like strength training at all, maybe you struggle to find the time to efficiently incorporate it with your running, or maybe when you do you end up with soreness that you feel negatively affects your running performance, or maybe some combination of it all.

I got you!

My Story

Whether you started early in life or relatively recently running can quickly become an invaluable part of your life.

I started running relatively early in life with my mom and her “running friends.”

Little did I know at that time how important having my own group of running friends would become to me someday. Even if at this point most of them are virtual.

Fast forward through high school, college, grad school and many, many more years of running, two career changes (engineer to teacher to now), and two children. Now as a certified personal trainer and running coach, pregnancy and postpartum corrective exercise specialist, and eternal student of all things running and movement science, I help women ditch the cycle of injury and burn out and finally make real, consistent progress towards their goals.

While I haven’t run another marathon since becoming a mom (yet), I have PRed in every other distance since. I look at the race photos from that hard earned, pre-baby Boston Marathon and KNOW I could smoke her.

I think it’s partly the experience and education I’ve built up and partly because I’m a mom.

​Because of, not in spite of.

In motherhood, now more than ever, I have to train with efficiency and strategy!

Efficiency first! The engineer AND the mom in me thrive on efficiency. No wasted time or effort!

Having babies also brought to light some biomechanical inefficiencies. They reared their ugly head in the form of constant hip, knee and back pain and pelvic floor symptoms. I had it all!

I firmly believe these inefficiencies were holding me back from reaching my full potential well before my child bearing years. For many women the stress of pregnancy simply reveals the invisible ink that was there all along. Addressing those inefficiencies not only eliminated my symptoms, it made me a stronger, more efficient, and more powerful runner overall.

This refers back to the “E” in my STEP Method where I said the goal is to minimize energy lost with each step. I think of energy lost as both energy you can't use to move forward AND energy lost typically means force is poorly distributed across your joints - which can lead to pain, injury or pelvic floor symptoms.

​THAT is where the purposeful strength training for the demands of running and strategy based on the needs of your body can make a HUGE difference in the way running feels.