You got injured because you were too weak. Well, that’s what we’re talking about today on the Doc On The Run Podcast.
Yesterday it started to snow and so I decided to go out on a trail run. It was raining earlier. I don’t truthfully like running when it’s 30-something degrees and raining, but it started to snow and I don’t mind that so much. Might be a little bit cold, but I don’t get so wet.
So I took off on this trail run and when I was on this run, no joke, I only saw one deer and two people. I actually came around a corner under these cliffs and there were two climbers approaching me and they were wearing jackets and all that kind of stuff, having all their climbing gear, but I just stopped and I looked at them and I said, “Isn’t it too cold for climbing?” and the guy’s climbing partner that was I looking at, he actually said, “Isn’t it too cold for a trail run?” and they both started to laugh.
The reality is that it is never too cold to go for a trail run. It is never too cold to go running at all, so if it’s too cold outside you can always run on a treadmill, and running in the snow when it’s just 30 degrees or so is a lot better than running in the rain when it’s 33 degrees to me, so you’ve got to remember that it’s never too cold, it’s never too late, and there’s never a better time to get started than right now, and there is no excuse ever for you not to get stronger.
If you got injured, a lot of people are not going to like to hear this, but if you got injured, it’s because you were too weak to withstand the punishment you served up for your body during your workouts, and then you got injured. Now if you’re injured right now, there are no excuses and there should be no excuses.
Let me say that again. No excuses. If you’re injured and you didn’t exercise at all today, there’s a 99.999% chance you’re doing it wrong. Now there’s always an exception and I know that, and that’s why I don’t say there’s 100% chance. Maybe there really is some reason you can’t exercise, but I seriously doubt it because I talk to injured runners all day.
In the majority of cases I believe that if you’re injured you could and should still be trying to get stronger. Now that doesn’t mean beating up your injury, it means figuring out what you can do to maintain your running fitness and strengthen everything else in your system that needs to support you when you start running again so that you can get back to running. If you’re not getting stronger, you’re doing it wrong.
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