Are you an injured runner or a recovering runner? And there is a difference, and that’s what we’re talking about today on the Doc On The Run Podcast.
I talk to injured runners all the time, and what I see is there are some runners who are kind of over the hump and they’ve started figuring out that they’re injured and they’re going to have to do a whole lot of work to actually get back to running quickly and then there are other runners I see who are basically just demoralized and depressed because they’re stuck in a rut. That’s really the difference between injured runners and recovering runners.
When I see somebody who calls me and they say, “I got an injury, how long do I have to wait,” wait for what? Wait for it to heal? Wait for you to lose all your fitness? What are you waiting for? You can’t just sit around and wait. Waiting is not a plan, anymore than you can sign up for a marathon and then wait to be strong enough to actually finish the marathon.
So if you get injured, I understand it’s upsetting and it’s completely demoralizing, it’s depressing, it’ll really bung you out, frankly. But you’ve got to take action, the same way that you would in training and the people that call me who I think of as injured runners, they basically take a victim mentality, sit around and they just think, “I can’t believe this happened to me, I can’t believe that I got injured,” and they’re not doing anything other than complaining of waiting, and that will not get you stronger. That will definitely get you weaker, very quickly, and at an exponential rate.
The longer you take off of running, the weaker you get, the stiffer you get, the weaker your bones actually get and all of that stuff conspires against you to actually increase your risk of another overtraining injury later once you actually do get back to running after you finally get some x-ray that clears you to run, or some doctor finally says, “You should go try it.”
All of those things that weaken you during the recovery process, when you’re waiting and not actually doing anything active for your recovery, will really work against you. So you’ve got to make the mind shift of becoming a recovering runner, somebody that’s actually doing something, something that’s going to move you stronger and further down the field throughout the recovery process, while you’re waiting for this one piece of injured tissue to heal. It’s really crucial, and there’s a huge difference, but it’s all based on the actions you take.
If you want to understand all the steps to actually recovering and getting past an overtraining injury, just go check out the 12 steps presentation that I have for you on the 12 Steps to Recovering From Any Running Injury, and it’ll help you really think about what you’re doing right now, what you could be doing differently, and what you can do to shift that mindset yourself.
It’s not complicated, you just have to start thinking about healing the injury and recovering, and staying strong right now, the same way that you would stay strong, get strong, become strong in preparation for a race when you’re not injured. That’s really the key. So go check out the 12 steps presentation, we’ll have a link for it at the bottom of the show notes for this episode at docontherun.com.
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