Running speed depends heavily on propulsion, and propulsion is exactly what a treated clubfoot has less of: a smaller calf and a stiffer hindfoot return less energy at push-off, on every stride, permanently. Training improves the engine around that; it does not replace the missing spring.

Which means pace is the one metric where the deficit shows most and responds least. Chasing it produces years of effort against the least movable variable, while the things that genuinely improve (distance, consistency, recovery, how you feel at mile ten) get treated as secondary.

It is remarkably consistent: build for six or eight weeks, feel strong, add a bit more because it is going well, then lose a month to something that felt like it came from nowhere. Then repeat, and conclude after a couple of years that your foot cannot handle running.

What usually happened is that recovery quietly stopped keeping up around week four and nothing in the plan noticed, because the plan was tracking distance and pace. A sawtooth graph is not bad luck. It is a ratio problem, and the fix is to change the ratio, not to train harder or give up.

Two treated clubfeet and a fused left hindfoot. I run distance, and I am not fast, and those two facts stopped being in tension once I quit treating the second one as a problem to solve.

What changed things for me was unglamorous: hip and glute strength, shoes with a rocker and some heel-to-toe drop, and treating recovery as part of the training instead of the gap between it. My asymmetry is unchanged. My mileage is several times what it was when I was trying to fix it.5