It’s sounds strange to hear Eilish McColgan say that a broken bone is one of the best injuries she’s ever had.
But upon closer analysis, it makes complete sense. McColgan knows the anguish and frustration of injuries that have no timescale for recovery and linger far longer than any elite athlete would wish.
But McColgan’s rehabilitation from her latest injury has been as straightforward and smooth as she could ever have hoped.
The ailment was a broken toe, which happened during the London Marathon earlier this year. McColgan finished the race in April in seventh place, and first British woman, but it transpired she’d run much of the 26.2 miles with not only severe blisters, as initially thought, but also a broken bone.
And so while infuriating as it was for the Dundonian that her finish time of 2 hours 24 minutes 51 seconds wasn’t an improvement upon her Scottish marathon record, set 12 months previously, the bigger blow was the impending stint on the sidelines.
But while, on paper, five months out of competitive action is significant, the 35-year-old has been both encouraged by the smoothness of her recovery, and the speed with which her injury lay-off has passed.
“During the race in London, I didn't realise I'd broken my toe but turns out I had, so I ended up taking about two months off and then began cross-training and building myself back up,” she explains.
“This injury is very different to others I've had in the past, though. Previously, injuries have been pretty serious and I've ended up having to have surgery and the injuries have grumbled on it's taken me a long, long time to get back.
“In contrast, this has been really straightforward because with a broken bone, you rest and it gets better.”
McColgan is now fully healed and she’s ready to return to racing. She has never been one to ease herself in gently and this return to competition is no different. Tomorrow, McColgan will take on the London Big Half while next weekend, she’ll be on the start-line for the Great North Run. Two half-marathons back-to-back is not for the faint-hearted and while McColgan admits to feeling a touch of apprehension about donning her racing shoes once again, she’s mainly just delighted to be back in competitive action.
“It doesn’t actually feel like I’ve been out for five months but I still have a little bit of nervousness about racing because I'm just hoping that everything feels good,” she says.
“If I was competing over a shorter distance on my comeback, I'd probably feel really confident but this is still early days with my general overall volume and the longer side of things is what I've been missing so this weekend's race is going to be the longest I've run in months.
“But you have to start somewhere and I can't just continue on in the fear that something might happen down the line, and so I feel confident enough now to race, it's just the distance that makes me feel nervous.
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“I am throwing myself into the deep end, but I have to start somewhere. Hopefully I can just enjoy a couple of races in the UK, because we really don't get to race very often in the UK. It just so happens that these two are back-to-back, which is a little bit of a shame because it would have been nice for them to be more spread out, but both of these are difficult opportunities to turn down.”
One particular disappointment of the timing of McColgan’s broken toe was that it forced her to miss the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games, depriving her of the chance to mount a defence of her 10,000m title that she won in glorious fashion at Birmingham 2022. McColgan did still make it to Glasgow 2026 - she appeared regularly on TNT’s television coverage - and while she admits she would have loved to have been racing on home soil, she was quickly able to rationalise the decision to sit out.
“Obviously there was initial disappointment when I realised I wasn't going to be racing in Glasgow because you have that fear of missing out,” says McColgan, who also competed at Glasgow 2014.
“But the more I thought about it, the more it made me realise how lucky I am to have had Birmingham because not many athletes get that opportunity of going into a major Games knowing they're in the shape of their life and that they can come away with a medal. Even in my wildest dreams, I didn't expect to win Birmingham in the manner I did so I can't be too greedy and I’m now even more grateful for the opportunity I had in 2022 to have run in front of 40,000 people that night.”
In London tomorrow, McColgan is one of the marquee names in a field that also includes fellow Brits Jess Warner-Judd and Lily Partridge while at the Great North Run next Sunday, the field includes some of the best distance runners on the planet including a host of major marathon winners and Olympic medallists such as Brigid Kosgei, Sheila Chepkirui and Tirunesh Dibaba.
Given McColgan has only been back in anything close to full training for a matter of weeks, she’s refusing to set concrete goals for herself but having spent the past month training at altitude in Font Romeu, she’s encouraged with the rapid progress she’s made.
“It would be impossible for me to be at 100 percent fitness right now with the time that I've missed, but I'm actually really happy with where I'm at,” she says.
“I can feel my fitness coming back to me and my runs are pretty smooth now so I'm heading in the right direction, but it's still very early days.
“I really don’t feel any pressure for these races because I know myself where I've come from, and if you'd seen me running three weeks ago, you would have thought this is not happening. So I know the progress that I'm making every week and I can feel my sessions getting faster so I just keep focusing on that.
“I don't have many definite targets in my mind for the next couple of weeks - London is not a particularly fast course because there's a lot of twists and turns so, for me, it's just about being back and competing on a British level. I'd like to try and win the race because I've won it twice before (in 2022 and 2024) so to win it a third time would obviously be really nice.
“The Great North Run is a little bit different because there's quite a few big hitters and the standard is so high. Again, I'm not focused on times - the focus for me at the Great North Run is just to be competitive with these world-class runners.
“Overall, it's just about getting used to the feeling of the distance again and getting used to pushing hard.”
Despite this current iteration of McColgan being primarily a road runner, she’s only run two marathons - both London - and neither have gone quite as she’d hoped with her first attempt being hampered by cramp and her second by the blisters and broken toe.
And so while a third attempt at the London Marathon in 2027 remains a target, the Scot is also keen to contest 26.2 miles elsewhere. All going to plan over the next fortnight, these two races will be a stepping-stone to further competitive appearances before the turn of the year for McColgan.
“I'm not quite sure of my schedule over the next few months but I'll certainly be racing over the winter, and then I'll be building towards more road races in 2027,” she says.
“I want to make sure that when I do another marathon, I'm not there just for the sake of it - I want to be there to race. Towards the very end of the year, if I can get myself into good enough shape then, potentially, I would do a marathon.
“I would certainly like to try and find something before London next year because waiting another full year again until April is going to be a little bit too long.
“It would be really nice to have another marathon experience outside of London but that will really depend on how quickly I can get myself into good shape. So the goal is to get through these races in the next couple of weeks, and then nail down some races later in the year.”
