Anxiety robs injured runners of action, and that’s what we’re talking about today on the Doc On The Run podcast.
One of the worst things when you’re an injured runner is to actually just stop taking action. Let’s face it, if you train for a marathon, if you sign up for a race and you don’t do anything to actually gain fitness in preparation for that event, you’re not going to do well. It blows me away when I see injured runners who have spent years in training, and then when they get injured, they just sit in a puddle of inaction that keeps them stagnant.
Well, anxiety actually robs you of the action because it takes away your energy to actually do the actions that you need to get back to running. That’s what anxiety really does. It gives you paralysis, basically, because you don’t know what to do. Now, sometimes you’re doing that, actually, it’s not your fault. It’s not that you’re just freaked out and not doing anything. It’s that a doctor actually freaked you out. Sometimes they tell you things like, “Well, you just need to chill out. You need to relax. You need to do less. You need to read some books. You need to watch Netflix, something other than exercise,” because they’re worried you’re going to hurt your foot. So it’s not that they’re trying to make you miserable and they’re not trying to kill your running fitness, but that really is a byproduct of what happens.
Now, whenever I do webcam consultations or when people sign up for the self-diagnosis courses that I have specifically for runners, the number one most important thing that they get is clarity and I know that because they will tell me. They’ll say, “I got more out of one hour with you than I did in three months of visits with doctors,” or, “I got more out of the Plantar Plate Sprain course than I did in a whole year of seeing different doctors, trying to figure out what to do.”
The reality is that confusion just breeds anxiety and anxiety causes fear, whether you actually recognize it or not and that fear causes immobilizaton. That immobilizaton and sitting still and doing nothing and taking no action is what actually results in most injured runners who just don’t know what to do. So if you think you have the wrong diagnosis, get a second opinion. Do something. Try to do something to increase your fitness today that’s not going to actually harm your injury. But just remember, hope is not a plan.
So if you’re just sitting around and you’re waiting and you’re wondering, and you’re worrying, well, that’s not a way to get back to running. You’ve got to do something else, and you’ve got to take action to get back to running. To do that, do something to get clarity about what’s really going on with your foot, what’s really going on with your ankle, what really is the diagnosis and the thing that you need to do to not just get your injury better but to actually maintain your running fitness while you get it better. That’s what you really need to do.
Now, if you want to see what I would do to work through that process of coming up with an accurate diagnosis for you, check out the 12 Steps presentations, where I actually go through 12 different steps I would do with you if I was sitting in your living room or if I was doing a webcam consultation with you. You can get it for free at docontherun.com/12steps. So go check it out, and I’ll see you in the training.
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