#12 Clearing the Calendar with Felicia Pasadyn

Saucony pro runner and NYU medical student Felicia Pasadyn returns to Early Miles for the conversation no one wanted to record. Months after signing her first pro contract, Felicia ran a 32:04 PR to win The TEN in late March… and days later was diagnosed with a calcaneal stress fracture. Boston was off the calendar.

In this episode, Steve Gonser sits down with Felicia to walk through the full timeline. The delayed symptom onset. The diagnostic journey from a clean X-ray through to the MRI at NYU that finally caught it. The unusual location of the injury and what likely tipped a manageable training load over the edge. Felicia also shares what happened when she fed her entire training log into ChatGPT and got back the word "psychotic"… and what that prompted her to reconsider about living almost exclusively in zones three through five, skipping rest days, and running high-risk, high-reward when the next five years of residency are about to make that style impossible anyway.

The conversation also digs into territory most running podcasts skip. As a soon-to-be diagnostic radiologist talking to a PT with fifteen years of running clinical experience, Felicia and Steve land on opposite sides of an honest debate about imaging, conservative care, and when an MRI actually changes management. They cover RED-S and hypothalamic amenorrhea, why a full hormonal workup mattered even when she suspected the injury was purely mechanical, and how the conversation around energy availability has finally started to normalize in elite endurance sport.

Felicia then talks through her return-to-run plan with her ortho, the cross-training base that gives her more options than the average injured runner, and the mental traps Steve has seen athletes fall into at every level — the bargaining, the phantom pains, the slow creep of "just ten more minutes." She's heading into a Cleveland Clinic radiology residency in Florida with two weeks of vacation per year for the next five years, and she's clear-eyed that this chapter of her running will look different. Slower, healthier, more patient. And, by her own framing, worth it.

If you've ever come back from a stress fracture, wrestled with whether to push for imaging, or felt the tension between training hard now and training sustainably for the long haul… this one will land.

Catch Felicia's first appearance on Early Miles here:

https://runsmartapp.com/felicia-ep1

Connect with Felicia:https://instagram.com/feliciapasadyn

https://instagram.com/wellfeliciafit

Connect with RunSmart:https://instagram.com/runsmartofficial

https://runsmartonline.com