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Pam Moore was running her third marathon in 2006 when it happened: she cramped up hard. The seasoned athlete had been through a lot of difficult circumstances while training and racing, but she wasn’t prepared for the debilitating, stabbing pain that suddenly announced its presence in her calf. She was only nine miles in, but figured she could tough it out. She pushed on, but soon the cramp spread: first, up from her calf into the then, then across to the other leg.
“It turned into a mental battle of, ‘Can I just make it one more step?’” she recalls. “It was excruciating.”
Ever mindful of her pace, she pushed as much as her body would allow, but “it was just like a death shuffle.” In the end, she says the whole experience was “miserable.”
Ask any endurance athlete who has experienced cramping during training or a race, and they’ll have a story…
