Sara Hall ran the fastest marathon of her career at 38 years old. A 2:20 — fifth fastest American woman in history, and a personal best that came nearly two decades into elite competition. Most athletes decline by then. Sara got faster. What changed wasn't her training volume or her coaching set up. It was her training volume or her coaching set up. It was her relationship with the part of her body she'd been neglecting for most of her career: her feet.

She dealt with plantar fasciitis in her late twenties — the kind that sits just outside of being career-ending, which in some ways makes it harder to address. You keep running. You compensate. The underlaying problem compounds. It took her a long time to understand that almost all of it traced back to instability she'd built into her stride by ignoring ankle and foot strength for years. We met Sara in San Francisco to talk about that shift — what she changed, why it worked, and what she'd go back and tell herself.

I pay a lot more attention to what's happening from the ankle down. For a long time I treated my feet like they were just there — I ran on them, I stretched after, I moved on. Now they're the first thing I address. My PT had me start working specifically on the big toe knuckle — getting force through it properly — because when you do that, you activate the glute further up, and the glute is your power muscle. That whole chain starts at the foot. I'd been missing the beginning of it for years. Once I started using the AxisBoard for that specifically, I could feel it. It was challenging in a way that told me right away how much I'd been leaving on the table.

In this injury that doesn't ever fully shut you down, it just keeps taking a percentage. You're running at 85%, 90%, wondering what you'd feel like at a hundred. I kept logging the miles, kept competing, but I was managing it more than fixing it. What finally turned it around was getting consistent with the small stuff — ankle mobility work, arch activation, the AxisBoard for stability. A few minutes after every run. The Echo was huge too, for calves and IT band — it goes so much deeper than a foam roller, and you can actually isolate the spots that are contributing to the tension in the foot. I've been using the Heel Hero specifically for big toe and calf mobility. That's the area that was always the start of the chain for me.

Ankle strength and mobility are huge for runners — and they're an area that gets overload a lot. Wobbly ankles create more wobble further upstream, which means more injury risk throughout your entire stride. The more stable and firm you can get that foundation, the more efficient you're going to be too, because all that energy goes forward instead of being wasted absorbing instability. I had plantar fasciitis earlier in my career and I think a lot of it traces back to not addressing this area early enough.