The luckiest place to find a weakness

First real run after a week off. I’d spent seven days deliberately not loading my back — chiropractor, a long massage, pilates, and no running pressure at all. So I went out this morning not quite sure what I’d find.

What I found was good. Really good. I planned an easy 5 and ended up doing a comfortable 6.9 on the watch — call it a bit over five real kilometres once you correct for my famously generous gadget — and the body felt strong the whole way. Warm-up walk, strategic walks, easy pace, and a back that stayed quiet from start to finish. Still feeling good hours later. The rest week did exactly what it was supposed to do.

But the thing I actually want to write down isn’t the run. It’s a shift in how I’m seeing my back.

For a while I’d been treating the recurring back niggle as bad luck — the one thing that keeps interrupting me, the weak link I wish I didn’t have. And this week I flipped it completely.

Here’s the reframe: I am finding out about this weakness now. At five and six kilometres. In base phase. Eleven months before the race. With the niggle still small enough to resolve, not a full-blown injury that puts me out for months.

Think about the alternative. I could have sailed through base training feeling invincible, never testing the weak spot, and then had it blow out at thirty kilometres in the marathon block next year — or worse, on the road to Durban itself. That’s how comebacks die. Not from the weakness existing, but from discovering it too late to do anything about it.

Instead, my back put its hand up early and loudly, at a stage where I have every tool and all the time in the world to deal with it. A chiropractor is on it. Pilates is building the core that protects it. I’m getting properly fitted shoes. There’s a whole team assembling around this one issue, eleven months out, while it’s still just a niggle.

That’s not bad luck. That’s the best possible timing for a problem I was always going to have to solve.

It’s the same principle as everything else I do: you want to find the crack in the foundation while you’re still laying bricks at ground level — not after you’ve built ten storeys on top of it. I found my crack early. Now I get to fix it properly before I build any higher.

So today: an easy run back, a happy back, and a quiet gratitude that my body showed me its weak spot while there’s still all the time in the world to make it strong.