More Is Less – Injury and Its Real Setback

Some of you are well aware of the fact that my running hasn’t been exceptionally productive lately, due to various injuries that span the past two months (and counting). Without thinking of it as anything more than a minor discomfort, I’ve been going about my training in denial – until today. Somewhere during my run this morning, I suddenly came to a full view of the impact an injury can create. While I’ve always been mindful about planning my runs with adequate rest and recovery, I admit that sometimes the idiotic runner in me takes over and makes poor executive decisions. The result: months of lingering pain and sub-par workouts to say the least. The physical and psychological damages have finally served me as a wake-up call, loud and clear.

To put the whole thing in perspective, I’ll have to explain it from the top. It was some time in mid September when I noticed an onset acute pain on my calf. While I knew it wasn’t the good old soreness from regular training, I proceeded to ignore the fact that it was getting worse. As this continued over a few weeks, it forced me to eventually cut my weekly mileage significantly. While I was able to keep my training intensity with weekly long runs and speed work, my calf would not allow me to push beyond a certain boundary – or even getting close to it. In the end I opted to reduce my mileage drastically to start seeing some improvement; and luckily my calf began to recover.

I suspect the cause of my Achilles tendinitis is directly linked to the prior calf injury based on two observations: they were both on the same leg, and they were in close proximity – relatively speaking. After some research I reasoned that the tendinitis likely surfaced with the increased strain I exerted on my ankle, due to the limited joint mobility as a result of the calf injury. In other words, running with the calf injury forced me to over-compensate with other parts of my leg – in my case, my Achilles tendon. I am not a licensed medical professional; but this made perfect sense to me as several articles I’ve found pointed to this conclusion.Two months after the birth of this parasitic calf injury, when I finally felt good enough to do a 20 miler some time in mid November, something else happened to my left leg. This time, my Achilles tendon was hurting like I’ve never experienced it before. And this tendinitis developed into a severe sharp pain during some runs – like someone was chopping the back of my heel with a small ax, every step I took. The tendon would also swell up after a regular easy run. It got to a point where I had to walk with a slight limp from time to time.

So what did I learn from all of this, and what was the shocking revelation that I already knew all too well yet completely disregarded? Well, it’s neither profound or life-changing. But I noticed that the setback from an injury was not worth any progress gained while training with it. That is, if I had fully stopped and rested at the first sign of my calf injury, perhaps I wouldn’t have gotten the tendinitis. In hindsight this may seem obvious – but at times my stubbornness gets the better of me. Especially when I had a monstrous summer this year in training, which inflated my head to a ridiculous size and led me into believing that I was invincible – ironically it was quite the opposite. The real setback of a particular injury, as I learned, is not the time it takes to recover. Rather, the real damage comes in full effect when subsequent or related injuries compound with the inevitable longer recovery time to ultimately result in a performance loss. One needs to train hard as well as train smart. There is no glory in being mulish and insisting on training with an injury – because if you don’t stop for it now, it will eventually stop you for a long time.

What’s your experience with running-related injuries? What preventative measures have you done to prevent injuries? What has not worked for you in this regard? Please share in the comment section below.

Author Bio: Kevin Lu is an engineer. He received his B.S. and M.S. in biomedical engineering from NJIT. Science, technology, and running are Kevin’s passions. In his spare time, Kevin trains for and participates in races of various distances. His recent PRs include: 20:58/5K, 1:39:33/half, and 5:48:22/50K. In addition to Beyond Distance, Kevin also writes for iRunnerBlog as a contributing tech columnist. Find out more about Kevin here and follow him on Twitter.

No related posts.