Somewhere Between Brave and Stupid, I Ran a 10K

There's a specific kind of stubborn that isn't brave and isn't stupid. It lives somewhere in between. Honestly? That's something I tell myself. A lot. This is a story about that.

Mid 2025. I started kickboxing — Harvey Specter from SUITS, you know how it is.

Six months in, on a random snowy day in December, I felt a sudden sharp pain in my right foot arch on my 0.3 mile walk home from class.

Strange. Figured I stepped on something hard under the snow. Moved on.

What I didn't connect was what I'd been doing to my body in the weeks leading up to that.

• Kickboxing 3 days/week.

• Running 3 miles almost every day — Nimisha had suddenly decided she wanted to be a runner, we'll get to that later.

• Lifting weights.

• Dancing to trending reels.

Not a single second of rest.

Woke up through severe fatigue and pushed anyway.

Brutal, Nimisha. Truly brutal.

She shuffled between Strava, Runna, ChatGPT and a professional trainer — expensive stuff — and just did whatever felt right. Bloody impulsive.

By December, the right foot gave up completely.

Plantar fasciitis, the doctor said. My tongue couldn't roll the word. She gave me medicines and told me to rest. But Nimisha had a trip planned. Don't know what this woman was up to.

After the trip, the pain got intense enough that she had no choice but to actually STOP — no escape. She wanted to move desperately. Tried resting. Got impulsive and broke it more than ten times. Classic Nimisha.

Here's something you should know about me. PCOS pushed me into the gym early. Glad it did.

My default was hitting it four to six evenings a week, coming home exhausted, showering, eating, sleeping like a child.

That exhaustion-to-sleep pipeline? That's my thing. Sometimes the only reason I go to the gym is the promise of sleeping deeply afterward. Also, no dark circles — steal deal, so why not.

Now suddenly I couldn't move.

No movement ➡️ Bad sleep ➡️ Bad mood ➡️ Overthinking ➡️ you know where that goes.

Amidst all of this, I signed up for a 10K in Nashville. Paid 100 bucks. Different state. Six of us, first timers, planning to meet, hang, and run together. If you ask me why — I honestly don't know.

YouTube taught me the root cause, I started proper stretches, used night splints. Pain got better — but the issue wasn't gone, and honestly it still isn't. I couldn't stay still. Tried yoga, YouTube Zumba, weird weird exercises — ah, what not. Something to keep my body moving. I can't, can't stay idle. I just can't.

I kept telling myself: be patient.

Patience is something I believed I was decent at.

Turns out — I am not. I just try. Sometimes I pass. Mostly I fail.

With myself, I am the most brutal. Self-realisation unlocked.

Then I made the mistake of going back to the gym too soon. Started a slow jog, felt great, brain took over, pushed into a full run. My feet started heating up like a volcano.

I genuinely checked if something was wrong with the treadmill.

Blamed the treadmill.

The audacity.

Can't help but appreciate my brain for coming up with such ideas.

You just gotta wait to see Nimisha.

Googled it — swelling, heat, not enough room in the shoe. Had to stop. Go home. Overthink. It scared me.

So I actually "committed" this time. Stretching 3x times a day, alarms set. Icing every evening. And I picked up Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Every time I felt the itch to do something impulsive — push harder, break the rest again — I'd stop and read a few pages instead. He just made me slow down long enough to not do the wrong thing. I think he was quietly with me through all of it.

Mr. Murakami is a runner and a writer. He shows up for both with the same quiet, relentless discipline. Somewhere between his pages, I decided I want that too. Both. And somewhere between those same pages, I also knew — if I didn't stay consistent, mile five of my 10K was going to make me pay for it. Spoiler: it did.

Back to the story,

January — periods skipped. Blamed the chaos. Consoled myself it was just PCOS.

February — periods came back. I felt like the happiest person on earth. Not even the woman who's actually trying for pregnancy and got a positive result would be this happy. I was more than that.

I quietly stopped obsessing and just did the stretches, the ice rolling, the occasional pain-free short run. Never went to sleep with pain. Waking up with a little ticklish soreness became my new normal.

Then March happened.

I went to Nashville for St. Patrick's Day.

The day before the race, I did a one-mile shakeout run. Some pain but bearable. That night, I couldn't sleep.

Two voices in my head:

You've been patient. You're almost pain-free. Do you really want to risk making it worse?

Why did you sign up at all then? To give up? Are you that scared?

Is this run, a life and death situation?

Who are you doing this for?

Why did you train, pause, stretch, and wait all this time — if not for this?

I knew if I ran and it got worse, I wouldn't forgive myself. I also knew if I didn't run, I'd carry that blame into every future commitment I made.

So I decided. I'd start. And if the plantar fascia pain really hit — I'd stop. That was the promise.

Race day.

❌ No carbs the night before.

❌ No stretch before the race.

❌ Months of broken training behind me.

Next time someone asks what not to do before a 10K — screenshot this. Save it. Share it.

You're welcome.

I went out slow. Probably last in the pack. Wasn't ashamed — I had a deal with my body. And somehow, mile after mile, my foot felt fine. The stretches had actually worked.

I was running, and it wasn't hurting.

Around mile four — dehydrated. Hit a hydration station, grabbed a Gatorade, kept jogging.

And then the core fatigue hit. Like a wall.

Everything went quiet in a bad way. My body started giving up in parts, one after another.

Calves screaming. Ankles buckling. Hamstrings pulling. Back aching. I couldn't name them in order — everything just started checking out.

The fifth mile is the only mile I remember from that race, and I remember every single second of it.

The world stopped moving. I was running but going nowhere. Like trying to push through water.

Then I noticed the grandma next to me.

She'd been beside me for what felt like an hour. Fast walking. I was jogging. Still not passing her.

Running with a grandma was never in my 2026 bingo card.

She kept saying — my heart is dying, my heart is dying — and I don't know when I started saying it too, like a chant. She eventually pulled ahead. Her pink mini skirt became my one landmark in the chaos. And then even that disappeared.

This is where it gets interesting.

Somewhere in mile five, I started talking to my body. Out loud. Not probably — definitely out loud. I was pleading with it like it was a lover walking out on me mid-race. Sorry sorry please stay with me, please stay with me, don't leave me. I spoke to my back, my calves, my feet. Every part still holding on.

And then something clicked.

I watch a lot of survival shows and documentaries. Enough to know that the human body can go roughly 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water. The man in 127 Hours cut off his own arm to survive. His body didn't give up — his mind refused to. So what was my excuse at mile five of a 10K?Which meant what I was feeling right now wasn't my body failing. It was my mind refusing to believe my body could keep going. This was mental. Completely mental(NGL, i turned mental at that point too). My body was capable. I was just struggling to accept it.

So I did the math. I was already in mile five. Just 1.62 miles left. I could push harder — really push — and pay the price later. Deal with the consequences after the finish line. But right now, just get there. 100 steps running, 100 walking. Then 100 running, 80 walking. Tightened it slowly. Kept going. And somewhere in that rhythm — I crossed the finish line.

I finished 5th out of our 6.

The finish line energy is a liar — a beautiful, convincing liar. I felt like I could run another mile. And then seconds later every nerve in my body fired at once. Full Fireball — Pitbull mode. Background score and everything. If you know, you know.

A medal landed around my neck. I touched it maybe a hundred times. Just stood there trying to make it feel real. A few months ago I couldn't walk without pain. And here I was — Nashville, St. Patrick's Day, medal, whole crew around me, green everywhere, the city alive.

We got food. And in that moment I had a beer. I don't even remember the taste — was it bitter, light, strong? I had a choice between Michelob Ultra and Bud Lite. I finished the Bud Lite. Like the race — just got to the end of it.

Straight talk now!

All of this might sound like impulsive, idiotic, chaotic decisions made by a stubborn woman who wouldn't listen to her own body. And honestly? It kind of was.

But I had people.

My school best friend — who heard 'hey, let's run a 10K when I visit' and said yes. Just like that. No negotiations, no complaints, no 'wait what?' She was adjusting to new work place, but still tried to train once or twice in a week, pushed through the race, and somehow still had enough energy left to make sure I actually experienced  Nashville and didn't just limp through it. Fourteen years of friendship and this woman is still signing up for my chaos like it's a great idea. That's her.

A man — who never once said to me, hey you should try running, it's fun. He just did his thing. Ran his races, lived his journey, and somewhere in watching that I fell in love with all of this on my own. That kind of inspiration is rare. The kind that doesn't push you or ask anything of you — just quietly makes you want to become someone who does hard things.

And a woman — also a runner — who was just there. Guided me about runs. Sat with me through the doubt. Held the emotional weight without ever making it feel heavy.

I finished this race because of months of stretching and icing and stubbornness.

But I started it — and kept coming back to it — because of them.

End Credits:

Came home. Showered. Heavy lunch. Almost dozing off.

Very not-so-nicely got into bed. My back — oh, the back pain. Terrible, so terrible — a pain I will never forget. Couldn't sleep properly. Closed my eyes, somewhere between asleep and not.

And in that half-asleep, body-on-fire, medal-still-real kind of moment — it hit me.

Nimisha — who plays it safe almost every single time — had actually pushed through it. Done the thing. No perfect conditions, no perfect training, no perfect body. Just showed up and got to the end.

I was smiling with a sleepy face, eyes barely open. Couldn't stop smiling. And then I was in deep sleep for two to three hours.

And somehow, in that quiet — everything felt worth it. The injury. The sleepless night before the race. The grandma in the pink mini skirt who smoked me at mile five. All of it.

Worth it.

So — what's the thing you've been putting off because the conditions aren't perfect yet?