About The Peaceful Runner

I started running in 2005, in my early forties, and I have been running virtually injury-free for years. That is not because I am lucky, and it is not because I have an unusual body. It is because of a lesson my own body taught me a few years into my running life, and that lesson is the reason The Peaceful Runner exists.

In January 2009, I turned to the Feldenkrais Method for a long-term back problem. I had tried the usual approaches and nothing touched it. I did lessons twice a week for about four months, and my back healed. But the healing itself was not the real lesson. The real lesson was how it happened: when I gave my body focused, gentle attention while making small movements, whatever was restricting my movement released. The pain was never damage that needed fixing. It was restriction waiting to be released, and my own attention was the tool.

Jackie Linehan, founder of The Peaceful Runner, running in minimalist shoes, in Bromley, England

I carried that lesson straight into my running. First I paid attention to how I moved, and my running form improved. Then, whenever I felt a pain or a twinge anywhere in my body, I gave it that same close attention. And I noticed something the running world rarely talks about: caught early and attended to, the twinge simply did not develop into an injury. I did not read this in a book. I proved it on the road, one run at a time.

From years of running this way, I came to a belief that now sits underneath everything I write: we are not victims of our bodies. Our bodies are constantly telling us what they need, in small twinges and tensions, long before anything becomes an injury. The pain is not the enemy. It is the message. When we pay gentle attention to it early, instead of pushing past it, we can release what is restricting us, and the injury never has to develop.

Why It Is Called The Peaceful Runner

I began meditating in 2004, the year before I started running, and it changed my life. A few years later I read Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman. So much of it resonated with me that I read it more than once, and it became the inspiration for the name of this website. The peaceful runner is the peaceful warrior on the road: the runner who finds stillness and wisdom rather than simply pushing harder.

I created thepeacefulrunner.com in March 2010, while I was leaving a career in I.T. in Canada to be with my future husband. He was working in Singapore at the time, so that is where our life together began. We lived there for a few years and married there in 2012. We live in England now, and I have been writing here ever since.

Who I Write For

If you have found your way here, you are probably a runner with a goal. A race on the calendar, a distance you want to conquer, a time you want to beat. And a body that keeps interrupting. A knee that niggles, a calf that tightens, a hip that flares every time you build your mileage. You have done the physical therapy. You have the stretches and the foam roller. You rest, you recover, you come back, and a few weeks or months later it happens again.

I will not hand you another stretching routine. What I teach here is a different relationship with your body, one built on gentle attention instead of force. I will show you how to listen to what your body is telling you while you run hard toward your goal, how to catch the twinge before it becomes the injury, and how to release what restricts you instead of pushing through it. The mind is not there to push the body. It is there to listen to it.

You will find that approach in everything on this site: the articles, my workbook The Peaceful Runner Method, the running meditations and race visualizations, and even the #PRPocket, a phone carrier I designed for minimalist runners like me.

You do not have to fear your body, and you do not have to depend on me or anyone else to keep you running. Your body has been speaking to you all along. You already have what it takes to answer.