Today on the Doc On The Run podcast, we’re talking about how you should never let your recovering body compete with your racing body.
This morning I was on a call with a recovering elite Masters athlete and she’s doing great!
During our call, I got worried about the way she was thinking about her upcoming workouts. The thing that I said that seemed to get her attention was feel like you used to without trying to beat who you used to. And the reason I did this episode is it just seemed to light her up when I said that.
You have to remember, it’s very difficult as a runner who’s been suffering through a period of inactivity, waiting, wanting, hoping to feel like your old self again. You want to run. You want to post the same kind of times. You want to feel like you’re fast and you certainly you want to feel strong, not weak, debilitated all the negative things that come along with being injured as a runner.
But you cannot forget the name of the game is restoring your fitness without increasing the stress and strain to the point of reinjuring that piece of tissue that got you in all of this trouble with this injury.
The biggest enemy in that battle is your desire to run as fast or faster than you were right before you got injured.
Don’t forget, this is human nature, so it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. But you always think how much you were training, how fast you were going, how you’re doing before you got injured. But you have to wait until you’re fully recovered to even think about running that fast again.
But what runners do (and what this Masters athlete was doing) is she kept actually, even though she had weeks off of running with this injury and now she’s back to running, but she’s increasing to try to get back to where she was before.
She still has in her mind, “…these are the paces I run.”
And I’m sure you’ve been through this same thought process, right?
You do an event, you take some time off, maybe after a marathon, and you’re thinking about how fast your mile repeats were right before you got to the event. You’re thinking about how fast your long runs were right before you got to the event.
But you’ve done the event. You suffered a lot of tissue damage. You took a bunch of time off. It’s not reasonable for you to think that you should be running as fast.
That’s why we have an off season, and when your offseason is over, you don’t begin right where you left off. You have to ramp up, drop down, let your body recover. It gets stronger. You ramp up again, drop back down, let your body recover. You have to really diligently apply that process to your return to running. If you want to get back to running as fast as possible without getting re-injured.
And if you want to get on a 10-minute strategy call with me, to talk about the pieces that you may actually just be missing because you’re too focused on a couple of the wrong pieces.
You can sign up for that by going to DocOnTheRun.com and go to the talk to the expert tab, or you can block my calendar for one of those calls here.
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