Today on the Doc On the Run Podcast, we’re talking about the 4 risky times for running injuries.
You wouldn’t want to run your car off the road and have an accident, so you might turn the radio on. You might roll the window down. You might shift around in your seat or something to try to prevent yourself from falling asleep, but you would be aware at least that you’re heading for trouble in that scenario. And when you’re running and training for a big race, you should understand that there are some certain times in your life when you’re actually a whole lot more risk at developing one of these over-training injuries.
And those ramp ups get bigger and bigger and bigger as you approach your key race of the season. So when you’re in your biggest build phase, you have had the maximum amount of abuse to the muscles, tendons, bones, and ligaments in your feet and legs. And that’s when you’re at the biggest risk of developing an over-training injury.
A second time that people tend to get injuries is when they’re sleep deprived. So sleep is the most abundant and the most underutilized resource available to runners, and if you have anything going in your life that leads to sleep deprivation, no matter what it is, maybe you have a baby they keeps you up all night, maybe you have stress that’s keeping you up all night.
The third time people get into trouble is when you have massive new work projects, you have some new level of responsibility. You have some sprint phase of producing a new product in your business. You have some new shift where you take on a brand new project that leads to a lot of stress and a lot of angst and maybe even sleep deprivation. Those new massive projects can often add so much stress to your life that you actually wind up with a stress-related injury and all over-training injuries in runners are stress-related. It is too much stress in you and it’s too much stress on the particular structure.
And the fourth thing is when you have some kind of family difficulty. Let’s face it, aside from work, we spend most of our time with our families and when you’re with your family and you have anything that’s disruptive and it could be a whole range of thing,s it could be something as obvious as going through a divorce. It could be something as obvious as a death in the family. It could be something like one of your kids get sick and has to have surgery or becomes hospitalized.
If you are a seasoned marathoner but you’re ramping up for your race and you’re just confident in your routine, sometimes you have a tendency to stick your head in the sand and ignore the little signs of an over-training injury and you just keep training because you think you’re familiar with routine and it’s always worked in the past and you’re not really accounting for this increased level of stress that comes from problems at home. So you have to pay attention to all of these things.
Be on guard in your biggest build phase. Watch out for any period of sleep deprivation. Realize that when you have a massive work project, you have additional stress. And if there’s any kind of craziness going on in your family that’s disruptive, that’s upsetting, that’s when you also have to pay really close attention to your body and listen and look for those clues that you’re heading for an over-training injury.
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!