Today on the Doc On The Run podcast, we’re talking about stress fracture wishes as fodder for facts.
Now today we’re talking about stress fractures and we’re talking about what happens when you as a runner, wished something to be true and it’s not a fact. It’s really important that you understand this. So some of the wishes are things like, well, I want to run. The second one is I don’t want there to be a crack on my x-ray. Some facts are, well, my podiatrist took an x-ray and there was no crack. So what does that do?
I see runners all the time who schedule second opinions who actually have signed up for the metatarsal stress fracture course, they’re doing something to try to figure out what they can do different and they will say, “Well, my podiatrist said that I have a stress fracture, but they didn’t see a crack. Does that mean I can run?” and then I ask them, “What does it feel like? What does it look like?” And they’ll say, “Well, it kind of hurts and it kind of swells.” Like those are facts.
What happens here is that we as runners, we’re always looking for something to confirm that it’s okay for us to do whatever we want to do. You’re not wrong for wanting to run. You’re a runner. You’re supposed to want to run. But it is wrong to actually stick your head in the sand and say, I don’t have a problem. But it’s also wrong to say, I don’t have any facts to go on. So even if you haven’t had an x-ray, you can actually look at how your foot is doing, how much pain you have, how much swelling you have, how much those things have gone away in the last few weeks.
You can then also look at how much does it improve when I actually do some of the stuff that is shown in the metatarsal stress fracture course, like putting the pressure somewhere else, taking some of their stress and strain off that injured metatarsal to shift it to the neighboring metatarsals so that it can actually calm down faster. What happens when you reduce all the inflammation in the bone, if you get the inflammation down, it feels way better and then you go for a run and the inflammation doesn’t come back. That means that a lot of the discomfort you were having was actually soft tissue swelling, and not even the problem with the bone.
But you’ve got to realize what are facts and facts are not just x-rays. Facts are what you feel, what you document, what you have as your pain level, how your pain level changes over the course of time, how that pain level either stay flat as your activity goes up or how that pain goes down as you do less activity. Those are facts that you can use to make those assessments.
I know it’s difficult. I know it’s frustrating when you have a stress fracture, but you’ve got to really think about what are your wishes and what are the facts that are going to help those wishes come true.
If you haven’t checked it out yet, go check out the Stress Fracture Master Class. You can get it at docontherun.com/stressfracturemasterclass. It’s a half hour web class where I go into a deep dive to teach you all the things you really need to think about and understand the framework that I use to help runners with stress fractures get back to running as quickly as possible. So go check it out and I’ll see you in the training.
