Think For Yourself
Every running subreddit I visit has some version of the same post. "My Runna plan says 10 miles today but my knee hurts, what should I do?" or "Garmin is telling me to take a rest day but I feel fine, should I ignore it?" These are grown adults asking strangers on the internet for permission to listen to their own body.
I use Runna. It's a genuinely good training tool that has helped me get faster and more structured. I'm not about to pretend I'm above using a plan. The difference is that when my plan says run 10 miles and my knee is screaming at me, I don't open Reddit. I stop running.
Pain is your body's way of telling you something is wrong. You don't need an algorithm to interpret that signal, and you certainly don't need a stranger on the internet to give you the green light to rest. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Runna has had to add features to tone down its aggressive training plans after a growing number of injury reports. Physical therapists are seeing stress fractures, shin splints, and Achilles issues linked to training load being ramped up too fast. None of this is the app's fault, not really. The app is doing what it's designed to do. The problem is that people treat its output as gospel rather than a suggestion, and never once stop to ask themselves whether the plan makes sense for their body on that particular day.
A training plan is a guide. It's a framework built on averages and assumptions about where your fitness level sits. It doesn't know you slept badly. It doesn't know your knee has been dodgy since Tuesday. It doesn't know you're stressed out of your mind at work and running on fumes. Only you know that, and if you can't make a basic decision about whether to rest or run based on how you feel, then no app is going to save you.
The Garmin rest day question is almost worse. Someone has a device strapped to their wrist that is literally telling them to recover, and their first instinct is to question it. Not from a place of genuine curiosity about the science behind the recommendation, which would be fair enough, but from a place of not being able to sit with the decision themselves. They need validation from a community to do something their own watch is already telling them to do.
Engage Your Brain
This isn't just a running thing. We've slowly handed over our ability to think and make decisions to tools and platforms across every part of life. People ask ChatGPT what to have for dinner. They ask it how to respond to a text from a friend. They copy and paste AI-generated emails without reading them, send entire documents they haven't checked, and defer to algorithms on questions that require nothing more than a moment of thought. The pattern is the same everywhere: faced with a decision, no matter how small, the first instinct is to ask something or someone else rather than just thinking about it.
People won't send a three-line email without running it through an AI first. They won't make a decision without checking what a chatbot thinks. Not complex decisions either, basic ones that require nothing more than a bit of thought and the confidence to back yourself. We've reached a point where people would rather trust a statistical prediction engine than their own instincts, their own experience, their own common sense. The tool is never wrong in their mind, so why bother forming an opinion at all?
Running used to be one of the simplest things you could do. Put on shoes, go outside, move your legs. Now it requires a subscription app, a GPS watch, heart rate zones, training load metrics, recovery scores, and apparently the approval of Reddit before you can decide whether today is a run day or a rest day. We've taken something beautifully straightforward and buried it under a mountain of data that most people don't know how to interpret anyway.
Running is mental. The discipline to push through when it hurts, the toughness to keep going when your brain is begging you to stop. That mental strength doesn't develop if you outsource every decision to an app. It develops when you learn to read your own body, make your own calls, and live with the consequences. Sometimes you'll get it wrong. You'll run when you should have rested, or rest when you could have pushed. That's fine. That's how you learn.
The people posting on Reddit aren't looking for information. They're looking for someone to take responsibility for the decision. If someone tells them to run and they get injured, it's not their fault. If someone tells them to rest and they miss a session, they had permission. It's a way of removing yourself from the driver's seat of your own training, your own body, your own life. Your body is giving you all the information you need.