PART THREE

Running Injury-Free: 50 Tips to Help You Avoid, Treat, and Beat Injuries

No runner wants to get injured. When you’re hurt, what’s normally one of the highlights of your day becomes an opportunity for endless rumination and worry; what’s usually a source of stress relief becomes a source of stress. When you’re hurt, you become achingly familiar with the famous five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—in part because you can go through all five within the space of a 30-minute run. When you’re hurt, things just don’t seem right with the world. So let’s agree that not getting injured should be one of your major, ongoing, underlying goals, whether you’re a miler or marathoner, a new runner or a lifetimer, a weekly racer or someone who has no interest in ever stepping to a start line.

Unfortunately, injuries are a fact of running life. Moreover, you don’t have to have a full-blown can’t-run-down-the-streetwithout-falling-over injury for something to be irksome enough that it interferes with your running. In fact, in some ways, chronic little niggles that you can run through can be more frustrating than major injuries, because they leave you in a constant guessing game, and it’s easy to accept them as a given, despite the toll they take on your running.

The tips in this chapter stem from a three-part way of thinking about running injuries. The first I’ve already stated—being injured stinks, so let’s try to avoid it. Second, when you’re injured or have a chronic low-level pain associated with running, you need to do things to get the immediate situation under control. What those things are varies among injuries. Third, all injuries are evidence of some underlying problem with your running body. An injury is an opportunity to investigate what that root problem might be, and then devise a plan for addressing it long-term so that the injury doesn’t recur.

Let’s start, then, by looking in general at why you get injured, how to know if you should keep running on your injury, and when to seek professional help. Then we’ll look at some immediate treatments for common running injuries, as well as ways to maintain your fitness when you’re injured. Finally, I’ll share some thoughts on the most effective ways to build a running body that’s highly resistant to injury so that you can better pursue your running at the level you want to.