Amanda Theodore is training for the 2028 Olympic Trials marathon with Pop-Tarts before most runs and a hard lesson about what happens when athletes eat too little instead of too much.

Amanda joins Dr. Andrew Fix for a conversation about marathon training that moves well past splits and mileage logs. She talks openly about the eating disorder she developed at Duke, the femoral neck stress fracture that followed, and why she waited until she had recovered from disordered eating before starting her path toward becoming a sports dietitian. What does recovery actually look like when your sport depends on discipline around eating? For Amanda, it means dropping the all-or-nothing mindset entirely. Dessert most days, a gluten-free Pop Tart before runs, a four-to-one carb-to-protein shake after them. The science stays in place. The rigidity does not.

She and Dr. Fix dig into why under-fueling carries far greater risk than over-fueling, especially for young athletes still figuring out what their bodies need, and why disordered eating patterns often hide behind the language of discipline. Amanda shares how routine bloodwork caught low ferritin levels early in her marathon buildup and how she scaled back training for three weeks rather than push through it. The two also trade notes on the unglamorous habits that keep athletes healthy enough to show up on race day, the warm-ups, cool-downs, and few minutes of mobility work on the living room floor. As Amanda puts it, getting to the start line healthy is sometimes the harder win.

Quotes

• “If you feel like you need help, you need help.” (11:20 | Amanda Theodore)
• “It’s really hard to overeat as an athlete, and it’s really easy to undereat, and the consequences of undereating are much greater than the consequences of overeating.” (39:51 | Amanda Theodore)
• “When you’re talking about overeating and under-eating, I think society pushes a lot of weight with that. But how are your labs looking?” (44:13 | Amanda Theodore)
• “You can’t just have a supplement and expect that it’s going to fix everything.” (50:13 | Amanda Theodore)
• “If you have a goal, don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t do it.” (51:30 | Amanda Theodore)

Links

Connect with Amanda Theodore:

Follow Amanda on Instagram

Tracksmith Stamata: Team Biographies

Amanda Theodore is an elite marathon runner and dietetics graduate student living and training in Colorado. After competing for Duke University and Florida State University in college, she set new goals at the marathon distance, running a personal best of 2:34 at the 2025 Boston Marathon. She has since qualified for the 2028 US Olympic Trials in the marathon and competes for Tracksmith Stamata. She is passionate about nutrition, with her perspective having been shaped by years of learning how proper fueling and recovery can contribute to a sustainable and fulfilling athletic career. 

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The post 239. From an Eating Disorder to the Olympic Trials | Amanda Theodore appeared first on Physio Room.

When the question every injured runner is afraid to ask, “Do I have to stop?”,  finally gets a straight answer, it turns out the real story has less to do with the pain itself and more to do with everything the runner wasn’t tracking.

Dr. Andrew Fix sits down with Dr. Vikash Sharma, DPT, founder of Perfect Stride Physical Therapy in New York, to talk through managing running injuries, avoiding stress fractures, and building a smart return to running after time off.

Stress fractures get missed more often than they should, and the clue is usually hiding in a two-minute conversation about nutrition and training load. Has your mileage gone up? Has your food intake kept pace? For a lot of runners, the answer to that second question is no.

For soft tissue injuries, Sharma’s approach is less about stopping and more about finding a sustainable baseline, trimming the run, filling the rest with cross-training, and using that window to build the strength and mobility that likely broke down first.

The conversation also covers training load management, deload weeks, why most runners’ strength work stopped producing results long ago, and what a real return-to-run progression actually looks like.

Find Dr. Vikash Sharma at @vikashsharma_dpt on Instagram or at perfectstridept.com. His clinical education platform for coaches and clinicians is at runningforlifeeducation.

Quotes

• “Runners run. That’s what they want to do, and they’ll keep running until the wheels fall off.” (09:48 | Dr. Vikash Sharma)
• “If two months ago you were running X amount of mileage and now you’re up 75% from that, but your nutrition hasn’t really changed at all, and now you’re starting to get signs and symptoms that make me think you have a bone stress injury, a hundred percent we’re shutting it down.” (10:39| Dr. Vikash Sharma)
• “Just like training their musculoskeletal system, just like training their nervous system and their brain — we got to train your gut as well.” (22:13 | Dr. Vikash Sharma)
• “Your low days need to be low so that your high days can truly be high days.” (32:53 | Dr. Vikash Sharma)
• “There’s always a story behind this human. There is a human in front of you. Just get back to that human element and dig — a lot of your questions will get answered the more they’re talking to you.” (54:23 | Dr. Vikash Sharma)

Connect with Dr. Vikash Sharma:

Perfect Stride Physical Therapy

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Most runners are one bad training week away from an injury they never saw coming, and the way they think about shoes, strength, and recovery is probably making that worse.

Dr. Drew Short specializes in working with runners at PhysioRoom, and his approach to running injury recovery starts somewhere most people wouldn’t expect: months back in an athlete’s training log. The culprit behind most injuries isn’t a single bad run. It’s accumulated load, under-fueling, or a strength gap that quietly grew until something gave out. When the mechanical picture looks clean, Drew digs deeper, sometimes all the way to blood work and nutritional consults. Multiple tendon issues flaring up in different parts of the body at once? That’s a systemic story, not a mechanical one.

The calf conversation is worth sitting with. Runners stretch it religiously and almost never strengthen it the way running actually demands. The soleus does significant work during each stride, but only when the knee is bent, which is almost never how people train it. A calf that always feels tight is probably asking for load, not length.

On the trail running vs. road running question, the differences go deeper than terrain. Strength demands, stability requirements, and pacing strategy all shift in ways that catch road runners off guard when they head onto the trails. And carbon-plated shoes? Both Drew and Dr. Ficks agree they have a place, but earning them matters more than buying them.

Quotes

• “The downside to under-fueling is you’re going to hit a brick wall. The downside to over-fueling is maybe a rumbly stomach…I’d rather be on that end of the spectrum.” (14:58 | Dr. Drew Short)
• “You might meet the rep scheme on a calf raise, but whenever you start making it more ballistic and you start using the tendon more, it doesn’t like that. The rate of fire is just a lot slower on that side.” (25:50 | Dr. Drew Short)
• “Stiffer tendons or more robust tendons — that’s just free energy. If you’re able to use that elasticity like a rubber band whenever you hit the ground, that’s less that the muscles are having to push off.” (33:19 | Dr. Drew Short)
• “If your calf always feels like it needs to be stretched, honestly, your tendon probably needs some load. You probably do need to be doing some heavy slow resistance through that tendon. Otherwise, you just keep stretching it all day every day.” (34:32 | Dr. Drew Short)
• “If I’m doing a long effort and I can still breathe just through my nose, I know I’m gonna be fine at hour three, hour four.” (48:26 | Dr. Drew Short)

Connect with Dr. Drew Short:
https://www.instagram.com/thenamesdrew/

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The post 226. Fast Comes Last: Getting Back to Running the Right Way | Dr. Drew Short appeared first on Physio Room.