Dear 19 year old Heidi

That shooting pain you feel in your hip during your shake out jog in Premana just before your last World Mountain Running Championships as a junior... I know you're not going to tell anyone about it, you're just going to ignore it and run the race anyway. You'll not worry about it too much - it'll carry you through to an eighth place, not quite what you were hoping for as you had your sights on a medal. Don't beat yourself up ... in a few years time you'll barely remember the race but you'll have fond memories with your teammates – you'll also remember Premana for the time someone commented on how much you heaped your plate up with food and for the first time you felt the beginnings of your first stress fracture. 

Just a week or so later you will fly out to Italy once more for the 21km FlettaTrail race. Perhaps you could do things differently, tell someone about the niggling pain in your hip before trying to run the furthest you've ever run in your life, let alone in a race. But you made it to Malonno and you will feel the magic of that special town. You wouldn't believe it if I told you in three years time you would have made Malonno your permanent home. That'll be a secret between you and me for now. Just keep dreaming and saying mamma mia to all the Italians. Everything will turn out all right even if your hip is playing up, because next week you'll be spending a few days in the heat at Lake Garda and then heading to Collina for the Tre Rifugi relay mountain race. The downhill leg is really going to hurt your hip and you're not going to feel great but at least you'll finally realise that once you get home, you need to get it checked out.  

And so 19 year old Heidi, you're going to fly home and see a number of doctors and physios. You're going to be given a lot of exercises to do for your painful hip. You're going to keep running and gritting your teeth through the pain. Probably not wise seeming as once an MRI scan is organised you will realise you have developed a stress fracture... and boom almost six months on crutches is waiting for you. And I'm sorry to say six months which will change your relationship with running, with food and with yourself for the worst. This is just the beginning.