Today on the Doc On The Run podcast, we’re talking about how injured runners must learn or earn the knowledge and experience necessary to recover from an overtraining injury.
Let’s face it, every runner who is injured and has been told to stop running wants to get back to running as quickly as possible. Every time I get on a WebCam visit or a phone call with a runner who is injured, they are looking for the secret path to healing and a fast track to recovery.
When it comes to getting better after you get an over training injury there are really only two possibilities if you want to get back to running as quickly as possible.
The first option it is to learn how to recover as quickly as possible.
You can talk to your coach.
You can talk to an expert on running injuries.
You can watch YouTube videos or listen to podcasts like this.
You can read a book on running injuries.
All of these sources of information are available to you for free, today, right now and can help you understand everything you need to do to maximize your body’s capacity for healing, maintain your running fitness and get back to running ahead of schedule, as compared to the standard treatment routines handed from standard doctors to standard patients.
The second option is to earn your way to understanding how to recover. This is where you experiment on your own and you do it wrong. If you go in and read about running injuries on marathon training forums on read about running injuries and read about the experiences, and sometimes the catastrophes that ensued when someone does it wrong, you will hear all about how injured runners have earned their way to recovery.
You keep running on a stress fracture and you think it’s fine. You make it worse. Maybe it even breaks. Maybe you wind up in surgery to put the broken metatarsal back together. The only thing two things you have to show for that experience is a scar and a huge bill. And you’re running suffers as a consequence.
If you have to suffer your way through that experience, you will have learned something valuable and you’ll probably pay closer attention when you start feeling pain in your foot the next time. That is certainly earning your way to experience.
But you don’t have to do it that way. You can use a combination of both. Think about what you have done to maximize your body’s capacity for healing after your hard training efforts. That experience is knowledge you have already earned.
Use that knowledge, the wisdom about rapid recovery from hard training efforts, the information you already have inside your mind right now, and apply it to your running injury so you can speed the healing of that injury right now.
Take all of the information you have earned about maintaining your running fitness and think about how you can apply that knowledge about maintaining your body’s strength, your capacity to support that one injured part, like the bone that has a stress fracture, or the injured tendon, and apply that knowledge to the recovery process, right now.
If you can take everything you know about recovering from workouts and apply it to recovering from your running injury you will definitely feel faster than if you just wait for healing to happen.
If you can also talk to an expert, learn through videos or podcasts, about some of the tips and tricks experts and other injured runners have used to help them recover as quickly as possible it will also help you understand how to learn how to get on the fast track to healing.
Take everything you have earned and then add everything you can learn about your running injury, right now if you really want to get back to running as quickly as possible.
If you are listening to this right now make sure you check out all of the instructional videos we have for you on the Doc On The Run YouTube channel. And if you’re watching a video on this topic, make sure you subscribe to the Doc On The Run podcast.
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If you have a question that you would like answered as a future addition of the Doc On The Run Podcast, send it to me PodcastQuestion@docontherun.com. And then make sure you join me for the next edition of the Doc On The Run Podcast!