You're Injured? Now What?
Asheville Marathon Prep (Ep 5)
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Today I want to talk about injuries.
Most of the time when people talk about injuries (myself included) it’s always about injury prevention. Doing strength work or mobility work in order to allow you to continue running and progressing towards your goals injury free.
While that is true, today I want to talk about the other side…what to do when you actually get injured.
Let’s jump in!
My Current Injury
Those that have followed along for sometime might remember I had a bad case of plantar fasciitis a few months ago.
I had some articles written about my recovery process then. But today, I want to revisit this topic of recovering from an injury with my new injury.
This time I got injured in a non-running related incident.
It all started a few weeks ago on a random Sunday (now it’s over a month). I woke up and went on a long run. That day it was 15 miles as I was building up my total weekly mileage for the Asheville marathon prep.
I got back from that workout and then got ready for church.
After church, we got home and decided to do some yard work. Again, if you’ve been following, you might know that we had a tree fall in our yard from hurricane Helene. That week, we finally scored a new chainsaw and it was time to put it to work.
I spent at least 3 hours chainsawing limbs and tree trunks and carrying large limbs to the front of our house where the fire pit is.
We got the tree off the yard and Taylor got all the leaves sucked up. Our grass was able to grow once again!
We went to bed that night after a job well done, feeling great.
Monday morning, the alarm went off.
I stepped out of bed and felt something awry.
My lower back was having sharp pain. I’ve had a sore lower back before from doing a lot of deadlifts in the gym. That’s usually a good soreness that tells me I did good work. This was different. This was abnormal pain; the kind of pain that says you screwed up.
I honestly can’t tell you if I ended up running that day or not. All I know is that over the next week or so I was having a constant battle of being furious and disappointed. I had just started this marathon prep, training was going great, I was hitting paces like never before, my nutrition was finally getting tuned up, and then this happens.
Running, if you don’t know, takes a lot more core and lower back strength than people realize. As you run and fatigue, your upper body needs to stay up right in good posture. While you may not always feel it, this actually takes a lot out of your core and lower back.
And if you hurt your lower back, you can definitely feel it.
After a week of running slower or less and cutting out gym movements, I decided I needed a better long term plan. How can I heal and continue making progress towards my marathon goals at the same time?
My Current Plan
One of the hardest decisions a runner has to make is whether to stop running for an injury to heal or not.
What if you stop for a week and the injury is still there? What if running won’t actually make the injury worse?
This is where being patient, listening to your body, and adapting to your body’s needs is crucial.
One thing I noticed early on as my back began healing was that there were 2 types of runs that exasperated the injury:
Long runs
High intensity running
So all of my key workouts were out.
I was left with putting in easy workouts, but I wanted to try and keep my total weekly mileage up. What I didn’t want was to lower mileage so much that when I came back to marathon training, I had to slowly ramp up mileage again.
The most frustrating part to all of this was that I built into this marathon prep smart. I slowly added mileage back in for total weekly mileage as well as my long runs. I did this to avoid injury. And it worked flawlessly.
Until I got injured doing something else.
But that is life I suppose.
The other piece to this puzzle I had to change was my cross training. I have mentioned before that I wanted to cycle once a week throughout this block, replacing one of my recovery run days.
Well, sitting on a stationary bike puts more strain on your back than running does. I tried it those first couple of weeks and everytime, my back felt more strained and in more pain after the workout than before. Which kind of defeats the purpose.
However, I discovered 2 alternatives:
The recumbent bike
Incline walking
The recumbent bike is definitely a little easier on the back since I have support to lean against, but it’s hard to push enough to get my heart rate up.
The newest exercise I’ve really enjoyed is hands down incline walking on the treadmill.
This is the most similar to running, but the impact is incredibly low since we are at max incline. And the intensity is a super slow walk.
My heart rate gets higher doing that than either of the bikes, which the goal of this workout is more about heart rate than anything else.
I actually don’t get as bored walking on the treadmill than I do on the bike. I can scroll on Instagram, read a book, pray, watch YouTube, read the Bible, and yes, even play the Switch.
It’s great!
And ultimately what I’m getting at with all of this, is the key to dealing with an injury is adapting the plan.
There is one thing I’ve learned about myself through this. If I change the plan the day of, or skip a workout because of an injury, then at the end of the day I feel like I failed the plan.
The plan said to run X miles at Y intensity and when it came to it, I failed the plan.
That’s the negative thoughts I tell myself. So how do I combat this?
Adapt the plan!
I’m actually starting to work on a coaching platform that does this for me automatically, and so I started playing around with that.
Now, instead of saying, my marathon plan today is to run 9 miles with 5 miles at a high intensity pace, my new adapted plan says to run 7 miles at a gradual pace.
That means the morning of that day I go out and run 7 miles. And that night I can cross that off, knowing I accomplished the plan.
It sounds like a silly concept, but it is a huge win in the mental game. And running is a huge mental sport.
But I also am starting to believe that the best way to listen to your body and adapt your plan is the day or night before. Not the morning of, and definitely not during the run itself.
Unless you feel a sharp pain that is throwing off your running form, I truly believe there is growth in pushing through that planned run.
How to Adapt
So, what is the best way to do this?
I just read a whole book on adaptive running and in fact like I said, I’m working on building a coaching platform that does this too.
In the meantime, I think the key is to learn how to listen to your body.
In our context here, adapting is all about recovering from an injury vs making the injury worse. So, if you do a run that causes you more pain, take note of that and avoid that if possible.
However, there may also be times when your body needs to recover. Maybe you are starting to get overtrained or even sick. Some key signs I’ve seen here are if your sleep is not doing well lately, if your resting heart rate has increased, or if your HRV is unbalanced.
For instance, I’ve been talking about my back injury, but at the time of editing this we just got back from our New Year’s trip. Over New Years I kept my running plan (now that my back is healed), but my sleep was poor. My HRV was off, my resting heart rate was slightly elevated, and I was getting less sleep than normal. At the end of the week I began to feel some unusual pain in my calf and achilles. Now, I’ve had to adapt once again before I get a full blown injury.
To be honest, I don’t fully understand HRV, but I know my body is stressed when Garmin tells me it’s unbalanced.
One takeaway here, though, is that listening to your body is tough. Most mornings when the alarm goes off, my body screams to stay in bed and don’t go on that run. Distinguishing between the voice that prefers comfort over work, and the voice that actually says, “hey if you don’t slow down you will get hurt”, is a very tricky balance and one I still haven’t mastered.
I think you will end up being on one side of the spectrum. Either you will lean towards adapting too much and never pushing your body to grow, or you’ll lean towards the OCD trait of “I need to get the training in or it doesn’t count no matter the cost”.
I tend to lean that way.
But whichever way you lean, learning to listen to your body while ignoring your body is a very hard skill, but definitely necessary.
And adapting to a run doesn’t always have to mean staying home and not running. Or go back to sleep.
Adapting could mean instead of running 10 miles, you run 8.
Or instead of running 10 miles with 5 at a hard pace, you just run 10 easy miles.
It could mean instead of a 5 mile easy run, you go spend an hour on the bike or hiking or walking incline on a treadmill.
Adapting is not an excuse to stop working.
Life is Full of Adaptations
The reality is that adaptations are just a part of life. Plans almost never go 100% smoothly. Our plans never perfectly align with God’s plans. And our plans often fall short of reality.
If you learn to adapt and embrace adaptations, then when life’s plans inevitably go awry, you will be better equipped to handle those changes, pivot, and embrace the adaptation.
However, if you avoid adapting, then when plans change, you will always view them in a negative light, causing higher levels of anxiety and frustration.
At the end of the day, maybe your plans had the same outcome, but your mindset can change everything.
And that’s what it’s like for my running. I could be bummed out and worried I won’t be able to make it to my sub 3 hour goal again.
Or, I could embrace the changes now, enjoy the fact that I’m nailing the plans I’ve adapted to, and be encouraged that all the other changes I’ve made that I discussed in our last blog are actually making impactful effects that I believe are setting me up for a huge success come March!
Does my back still frustrate me? Absolutely!
But am I going to sit in that frustration and let it give me more anxiety or depression about not being able to hit a full 18 week marathon block? No!
And so, whatever your goal, whether you are sticking to the original plan or an adapted one, go out and run with joy!