Thank you in advance everyone. I first came across LetsRun at the beginning of my running career, it sparked my life, and I'm hoping it can restart mine now.
I started running in junior high and ran through high school and college, progressively improving my times. My junior year of high school I got a stress fracture in my shin in track, which ended that season, but other than that, I was relatively injury free the whole time - though I should note this was "by the grace of god," or whatever you want to call it, since I have always been incredibly inflexible.
So I ended my college career back in the spring of 2012, and with that, my "serious" running. After that I continued running and competing, nothing like I had been doing, just a gradual easing back.
Well, from time to time I got the "spark" back to re-start seriously running again, and I was cautious about it. I tried to build up cautiously, so for example, let's choose the spring of 2014, I started from 0 mpw to let's say 30 mpw, in a gradual progression. Well, it would go great for a few weeks, and then where I had my stress fracture would start hurting, or somewhere else would start feeling like it was getting injured, and I had to call it quits. Maybe an hour was my limit for a run before areas started hurting.
Now let's fast forward say one year to 2015, and I can't get past 45 minutes without pain, past 25 mpw. Fast forward to 2016, my limits are 40 minutes, 20 mpw...2017, 35 minutes, 15 mpw, etc...fast forward to today, when I realized that I literally cannot run more than 15 minutes without starting to feel pain, and cannot even muster a 10 mile week. This is after taking weeks off, and though I no longer have the fitness I once had, I should not have the pain.
I used to dream about making the Olympics. That dream is obviously past, but I just want to be able to run again.