After injury, a marathoner pairs up with a Coach to hit new, pain-free PRs.
Forged at Equinox is a series highlighting an Equinox member’s foray into a new workout regimen, with help from an expert Coach. The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Molly Guptill Manning managed to squeak through roughly 17 years of running — half-, full-, and ultra-marathons, plus every race in between — without an injury.
But that good luck ended in 2024, when her right leg became aggravated without a clear cause. With her sights set on racing the Boston Marathon, she pushed through, cutting weight training from her routine, fearful of exacerbating her pain, and focusing on cardio. Enter: a vicious cycle of resting to cope with the pain, then training when it subsided.
The New Yorker conquered the major marathon, but post-race imaging showed that Molly’s calf muscle was torn and her Achilles tendon was inflamed, she says. She briefly had to stop running entirely.
When it came time to get serious about her workouts again, she knew she couldn’t do it alone. “I've been going to the gym for decades — like, I know the drill at the gym,” says Molly. “But I think having an injury made me really want to have some help in terms of coming back and making sure my form is right, making sure that, you know, [if] something starts to feel uncomfortable, do we need to make any modifications? And what would those modifications be?”
That’s the exact input Daniel Vida, a senior personal training manager at Equinox, could provide. As a sports performance training specialist, Daniel says he understands the best paths forward from injury. The duo initially focused on three objectives during their twice-weekly sessions at Equinox Flatiron: return to pain-free running, implementing daily activities and movements that keep the body running smoothly, and reworking the mindset around injury recovery.
Since July 2024, Molly has worked through a protocol that balanced her weekly mileage and race goals with corrective and performance-enhancing elements, including sprints, core work, and unilateral strength moves.
The plan paid off. “I feel like my body has never felt as strong as it does now — because we've been doing a lot of weight training together and he's constantly correcting my form, because my body likes to make little modifications all the time that are incorrect,” says Molly. “But Dan has just really helped me progress, I think, way faster.“
By November, Molly was able to run the New York City Marathon pain-free. “I was almost in tears before going to run New York because I had so much gratitude for Dan,” she recalls. “I just felt like I would not have made it to the starting line if he had not helped me get there.” From there, they focused on building a competitive edge. Just this March, Molly ran her fastest half-marathon in two years. “All of the training with Dan ensured I had endurance to hold a competitive pace through the entire race, never slowing down,” she says. “I cannot wait to see what's possible this fall, with more months of training with Dan. I have no doubt I'll continue to shave minutes off my time and post even faster finishes.”
Here, Molly and Daniel open up about the progress they’ve made and the necessity of having a balanced physical and mental approach to training.
What improvements have you experienced from your training, both in the Club and on your runs?
Molly: “Before Dan, I just kept having a lot of difficulties doing any kind of weight exercises, and it just felt wrong all the time post-injury. Working out with Dan, I feel like we have actually made almost linear progress. There have been a few setbacks here and there, where I probably just overdid it in a session — like, on my own with running — but otherwise, we've really progressed, like being able to add weight.
“Something else that I've noticed that's been huge is that all of my bigger muscles that I need to fire when I'm running — like my glutes and my hamstrings and my quads — are working now, instead of my smaller muscles, like in my calves, and putting pressure on my Achilles. It’s no longer doing that.
“Even if I go into a workout with Dan and I'm like, ‘Ah, things are a little tweaky,’ by the time we go through the entire sequence, I just feel solid. I feel so strong after working out with Dan. He’s a perfect match for whatever my goals are. Like, he has been so perfect in tailoring workout programs and just getting me to keep making progress along the way. And I know I wouldn't have been doing this without him, because the many, many months after my injury, I was just, like, floundering and things were not improving.”
Daniel: “The fact that we went from ‘How do we run without pain?’ to ‘How do we actually do better than those [pre-injury] times?’ is a very exciting accomplishment.”
How would you describe your approach to training?
Daniel: “At the end of the day, if I'm ever training an athlete, I have to keep their primary focus top of mind, which is not strength training — it's their sport. So it's very important that my strength training is supportive, complementary, and adaptive to running.
“We get a lot of data from running. I think it can actually be predictive of how things are going to feel in future weeks. So perhaps we can incorporate more corrective exercise or remove things that could be exacerbating existing symptoms that are starting to creep in.
“Molly and I are communicating as necessary outside of sessions. She's very, very good at being intuitive, taking notes and coming in and knowing that we have that first five to 10 minutes of the session to ease in the movement, catch up on things like that. A lot of [the programming] is pre-prepared, especially understanding the nature of, like, the undulated structure of the mileage throughout the week. But like I said, sometimes things just come up, and we know that we need to make [changes]. Sometimes it’s things as simple as what intensity we're going to train the planned exercise at, all the way through actually changing what we have planned for the day.”
Molly: “I feel like every warm-up, we usually chit-chat, like, ‘How was the week? Did you notice anything?’ He dials in every workout so that each week…we are training in a smart way. If it was a really high-mileage week, he adjusts what we do in our next session to be accommodating to that.”
How has mindset influenced your recovery and return to competition?
Daniel: “[Injury recoveries] are always longer than you think they are. They never move at a linear rate, and it can be very defeating. And what I know about athletes is they can start to lose their identity when they're not able to do their sport and feel the way that they normally do from it. Addressing the mindset, which now empirical science is supporting, actually is correlated with rate of injury recovery.
“[Part of] helping overcome mental barriers is setting reasonable goals. Especially being an athlete, so much of the world feels like you have to give it your 100 percent…[It’s also important to help] the athlete understand that discomfort is going to be a part of overcoming injury. I find that Molly is very self-aware and able to communicate good versus bad, and I also feel very confident in my ability to introduce progression and regression into exercise so that we're never going to do something where I'm not sure if this is going to be safe. [It’s about] both scaling the expectations to what we're really trying to achieve today, as well as getting comfortable with the fact that this is going to be uncomfortable until it's not.”
Molly: “Especially when we first started, I was always so worried about re-injuring myself. It’s impossible to know to what extent you've really healed…I lost a lot of confidence in my performance by being injured, and I lost confidence in just trusting my body, that I could do things that I could do before and not be injured by it. I was injured for such a long time, and I got so used to feeling pain just walking, doing the most basic things. I feel like Dan really helped me work through a lot of that.
“When you work out, it's not like you feel great. It's not like you're comfortable. There's good pain and there's bad pain. So Dan and I have talked a lot about that, too. I like feeling the good pain that comes from pushing yourself and reaching new heights, and I'm terrified of the bad pain of, like, ‘This is on the road to injury.’ But I think that my mindset now is so much stronger, and I really give Dan so much credit for this. We work through so much in every session, both physically and mentally, so that I don't find myself thinking about injury like hardly ever at this point. I just notice how strong I feel and how we're able to push the boundaries in terms of reaching the good kind of pain.”
How have you utilized other services at the Club to support your journey?
Daniel: “Our Spa team worked with Molly specifically during our return-to-play phase. It's been less a part of our performance program, but specifically when we were doing return-to-play, I partnered — and frankly, outsourced — components of the injury recovery with Linda, one of our LMT [licensed massage therapists] here, and she was fantastic. Molly has been doing e-stim, acupuncture, and cupping. There's been a lot of recovery modalities that have partnered with us.”
Molly: “When I tried [Linda] out, it was like night and day. There were almost, like, physical blocks or something in my body, and she was able to, like, unblock them. I felt like my body would flow more and would have much greater range of movement. That was really important in terms of being able to, like, get the rust out. I had to stop working out for a few months after going to the doctor and finding out how injured I was. It was almost like my whole body was so rusty. Following Dan's recommendations has been really useful in terms of just being able to work out hard, but then also taking care of myself so that I'm ready for the next workout.
“It's really uncomfortable, and then you walk out [of the Spa] and you just feel like you have a brand-new body. That's what kept me coming back — I don't care how painful it is, because I feel so good afterward.”
What have you learned most from working with a Coach?
Molly: “I've learned so much from working out with him. I think one thing that maybe kept me from doing personal training for a while is I felt like I've worked out for a long time, I've always been healthy, and everything seems to be working well. But I think in a way, by getting injured, I realized there's so much more that I should have been doing all along, and I think my performances could have been so much stronger if I had been working on these exercises when I was perfectly healthy.
“Dan and I are both really excited to see what performances we can get out of me by just combining really smart training — having a really good strength routine — coupled with running, you know, doing my normal runs. I do think I have a lot of fast times left in me.”
Photo Credit: Jared Ryder