Running injuries are like compounded interest but in reverse. That’s what we’re going to talk about today on the Doc On The Run Podcast.
Every runner who gets injured is in a race against time and the race here is to not lose your running fitness. You know you’re going to get weaker, you know you’re going to get stiffer. You’re probably really concerned that you’re going to lose all that aerobic fitness that you spent months or years building up.
Every investor understands the power of compound interest. It means exponential growth over time. If you take money and you put it in an investment and it pays about 10%, well around seven years or so, it actually doubles and it’s an exponential growth. You only get a little bit of growth and then it gets way way way better over time. This is true of running injuries but it’s in reverse.
When you’re a runner and you get an overtraining injury and you don’t make a quick decision and you don’t take action right away, well, you don’t pay for much in a few days. In fact, you don’t really pay for much at all in a week. But after 10 days, things start to get worse and after four weeks they are exponentially worse and it’s six weeks, it’s way worse still, and you go 12 weeks you can end up with all kinds of permanent problems. Weakness stiffness, loss of neuromuscular connections, bone weakness in the form of osteopenia where the bone density is actually decreasing and of course, loss of all of your hard-earned cardiovascular fitness.
So, the same way that investors pay attention to compound interest, you need to pay attention to this compound capacity to lose all your fitness and develop other problems that are going to put you at risk of an overtraining injury.
The point of this episode is not to frighten you, it is to let you know that there are things you can do. You can take action and you can modify that equation based on your willingness to really take action quickly, figure out what’s wrong right away and start exercising in ways that do not stress or strain down one piece of injured tissue that you have when you get an overtraining injury.
Remember, it’s only one, it’s not all 26 bones in your foot that are injured. It’s one. It’s not all the tendons and ligaments. It’s one and you just have to make sure you’re not stressing and straining that one, so that you can work hard to maintain your running fitness as that thing continues to heal.
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