I hate them. I mean, I really hate them—as much as I hate audible chewing, people who lack spatial awareness, and corporatespeak. (Synergy! Scalable! Drill down! Ugh, please shut up.) I hate them with the fire of a thousand blowtorches marinated in liquid capsaicin and poached in magma.

What are “them,” you ask?

Them are shin splints, and them are the worst.

When I first began to run, it felt as though my tibialis muscle was being ripped from the bone, fiber by fiber. Guess what! It still feels like that. Except now, I run more often than next-to-never, which means my tender tissues are being yanked from my skeleton at a more frequent rate.

For the uninitiated, “shin splints” is an umbrella term for the stress pains experienced in the front or inner area of a runner’s lower leg. In case the ripping description above wasn’t evocative enough, I’ll try again: Imagine your shin muscle is a wet rag you’re wringing out, twisting until it feels so torqued up and taut it can be wrung no more. Imagine someone using two forks to then tatter your shin muscle, in much the same way one shreds a hunk of braised pig into pulled pork.

In my case, the pain is always in the front of my leg, never the side; this means I’m suffering from anterior, as opposed to medial, shin splints. The bulging, teardrop-shaped muscle that extends downward from my knee—my right one, most often—sometimes gets so tight and stiff by the third or fourth minute of a run that I have to pause and use the sturdy butts of my hands to rub the pain away. On dire days, I’m able to rub away only enough agony to limp home. On the worst days, I’m too racked with the fear of shin-shredding to even go out.

Needless to say, this cannot stand. Not if—Attention, attention, this is big!—I’m going to start increasing my endurance enough to run the Walt Disney World 5K in January. Yeah, that’s right: a 5K. I’m taking on this modest goal because I enjoy succeeding more than I enjoy failing, and because the whole idea of running, after all, is to advance carefully, incrementally, toward ever more ambitious plans. In fact, pushing too hard too fast is typically why those demon splints occur: Work your legs too strenuously before they’re ready, and they’ll scream bloody murder.

But can I possibly be “pushing too hard”? My pace would embarrass a snail. I mean, for God’s sake, I’m giving myself six months to train for a measly 3.1-mile race. I’m not exactly shooting for the stars, here. Something else must be at play.

After a bit of digging (i.e., looking at relevant articles on runnersworld.com—I swear they don’t pay me to plug the site), I learn that shin splints aren’t caused only by overzealousness. They can also be caused by overpronating, which is when the foot rolls excessively inward with each strike. Luckily I can nix this potential culprit from the list of suspects. I underwent a gait test at the running-gear store before buying my slick Mizuno (they don’t pay me, either, I swear) running shoes, at which time I learned that my feet are remarkably neutral—they don’t roll inward or outward. My feet are moderate centrists! Additionally, the “old, worn shoes cause shin splints” maxim clearly doesn’t explain my affliction—I just bought mine.

It seems that shin splints can also result from inadequate stretching. But no, no, that’s not me at all. I stretch diligently. I enjoy stretching. It feels awful in a good way, like those massages that hurt so bad they make you tear up, but also cure your kinked neck. Another explanation bites the dust.

And then I find the quote—also on runnersworld.com—that clicks everything into place: “Because the propulsive motion of running works the rear of the leg more so than the front, muscle imbalances are common among runners…runners typically have overworked, tight calf muscles and weak shin muscles.”

Aha! Because here’s something I’ve not yet mentioned: My calves are naturally ginormous. They would not be out of place on a heroic Hellenic statue (of a man). They’re basically a pair of cantaloupes. Suddenly, it becomes clear to me that the enviable cannons attached to my gams are bullying my puny tibiales into submission. The solution? Beef up those shins, baby!

Here are a few ways that one can do this: Point your toe and draw the alphabet on the floor (I choose to write KATIE RULES over and over); put a towel on the floor and use your toes to grasp it and pull it toward you; stand with all 10 toes on a step, then slowly sink one heel down, then raise it again. I go at these exercises with vigor. And after a few weeks, I start to notice that the ol’ splints have, by and large, split. They come back now and again, but they are no longer the constant menace they were.

I’ve spent a lot of time here talking about hate. Let me change it up and talk about love. First off: I love Epcot. I mean I love it. I love that the Japan area’s gift shop has such a wide array of strange and intriguing candy. I love the divine avocado margarita in the Mexico section. I love seeing the characters from The Aristocats in the French district. I love Disney World as a whole, really—in fact, I love it almost as much as I hate shin splints. Good thing I’ll be trading one for the other, a dozen reps of KATIE RULES at a time.

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Kathryn Arnold is a writer in New York City and the author of the novel Bright Before Us (2011).