She finished the race with a bleeding foot. But this isn’t just about resilience — it’s about the everyday ways women ignore what their bodies are trying to say.
At mile 13 of the London Marathon, elite runner Eilish McColgan felt something go very wrong inside her shoe. A blister — already forming, already pressing — gave way. "The only way I can say it," she described afterwards, "is I felt like my foot just exploded." Blood soaked through the fabric. She kept running. Thirteen more miles. She finished seventh.
The headlines called it remarkable. And of course it was, in a literal sense. But what struck me, reading her words, wasn't the achievement. It was something she said almost as an aside: I just started to hurt in different areas then as well. So I don't know if I'm running funny through it.
There it is. The body, trying to protect her from one injury, quietly creating others. The knee going at mile 24. The gait shifting without her even noticing. Pain redistributing itself because the original signal was overridden.
Most of us are not elite athletes. We are not running 26 miles in under two and a half hours. But we know this experience — the one where you override a signal, keep going, and find the cost showing up somewhere unexpected, later.
It might be the period pain you took ibuprofen for at 7am so you could sit through back-to-back meetings. The third week of disrupted sleep you've been "managing." The afternoon exhaustion you've been calling a caffeine problem for two years. The way you've stopped noticing that you dread Sunday evenings. The irregular cycle you keep meaning to mention to a doctor.
None of these feel dramatic enough to stop for. None of them announce themselves as emergencies. And so you keep running.
This is the particular texture of how many women move through the world: not collapsing, not calling for help, just quietly adapting — shortening the stride, compensating — while the underlying problem goes unaddressed.
Here's something worth sitting with, physiologically. Your body does not distinguish between the stress of a burst blister and the stress of a full inbox, a looming deadline, a difficult relationship, or a night of broken sleep. These all activate the same hormonal cascade — cortisol rises, adrenaline pulses, the body enters a state of readiness. That state is useful in the short term. It is genuinely useful. But it was designed for acute threat, not for being permanently, low-grade overwhelmed while still appearing completely fine.
When the stress response is chronically activated — which happens when you consistently ignore what your body is flagging — it begins to interfere with other systems. The hormonal architecture that regulates your cycle, your mood, your energy, your sleep, and your immune response is not isolated from your stress response. It shares infrastructure. Cortisol, progesterone, and estrogen are all running on the same network. When one is chronically elevated, others shift to accommodate it.
This is why a woman who is exhausted may also find her cycle becomes irregular, or heavier, or disappears for a while. It's why the person who "just pushes through" everything often finds that their fatigue is bone-deep rather than merely situational. It's why the knee starts to hurt at mile 24, when it was fine at mile 13. Not because something new broke, but because the whole system was already compensating.
The way we tend to think about symptoms is as isolated problems requiring individual solutions. Tired? Sleep more. Irregular cycle? Track it on an app. Anxious? Try meditation. Bloated? Cut out gluten. This approach treats each signal as a separate failure of a separate part, when the body almost never actually works that way.
What the body does, all the time, is communicate through patterns. A symptom rarely appears in isolation. It appears in a context — a season of high pressure, a period of poor sleep, a stretch of time when eating or movement or rest have all been quietly deprioritised. The symptom is not the whole story. It is a character in a larger narrative, and the narrative is worth reading.
Eilish McColgan said something telling after the race: I just couldn't put any pressure through my foot. She couldn't put pressure through the very thing she runs on. That image stays with me. Because this is what prolonged, unaddressed strain can do — it doesn't just hurt. It eventually removes your ability to bear weight on the things that carry you.
The conversation around women's health has, for a long time, defaulted to two modes: either you're in crisis and need medical intervention, or you're fine and should carry on. There is very little cultural language for the middle ground — the state of being not unwell, exactly, but also not particularly well. Of running on compensated gait. Of functioning through a blister.
The idea that strength means endurance is so deeply embedded that most women don't even register it as a belief. It just feels like reality: of course you push through, what else would you do? And sometimes you absolutely should. Endurance is real, and it matters, and it is not a character flaw to finish what you started.
But there's a different kind of strength that rarely gets talked about. The kind that involves pausing, mid-race, to ask: is continuing this going to cost me something I can't afford? Not because stopping is weakness, but because the 26 miles ahead may matter more than the mile you're currently on.
Awareness is its own form of capability. Noticing the blister before it explodes. Recognising the exhaustion before it becomes burnout. Catching the hormonal disruption before it becomes a much more complicated conversation with a specialist. Responding to the pattern, not just the crisis.
So here's the thought I'd leave you with — and it's a slightly uncomfortable one.
If you were to read your own body the way a good diagnostician reads a patient, not looking for a single problem but looking for a pattern, looking for what speaks to what — what would the story be?
Not what are you managing. What are you actually saying?
Because the body has been talking the whole time. The question is whether we've been trained to hear it as information, or trained to hear it as inconvenience.
You don’t have to wait for your body to “break” to take it seriously.
At Shakti, we help you understand the patterns before they turn into problems. Follow us on Instagram @heyshaktii, or book a conversation with a doctor if you’re ready to look a little deeper.
