I don’t know if Run Forever has improved your running—I certainly hope it has—but I can now say for certain that it has helped mine. Here’s what happened. Two months ago, as I was beginning the final long push to complete the manuscript for this book, I suffered my first injury in seven years.
I’ll tell you more about the injury in a few moments. At this point the most salient detail is a word about my prior history in the injury-recovery department: Sad. Depressing. Nothing to crow about. I have been far too impatient. Impulsive, even. I have caused further injury when the goal was gradual healing.
As a sophomore in college, I suffered a stress fracture to a metatarsal of my left foot. It just happened one day while I was running. A similar injury is so common among army recruits in basic training that it has been given the name march fracture. Not because it happens in the month between February and April, but because it strikes new recruits while they are going through various marching drills. It’s an overuse injury, plain and simple.
Also, it’s common and uncomplicated. It took my doc about 30 seconds to figure it out. And to prescribe my treatment. I didn’t need to hobble around on crutches. I didn’t need to have my foot immobilized in a cast. I needed only to stop running and other serious exercise for six weeks. Small toe and metatarsal fractures, like the one I had, heal themselves.
If you let them. Unfortunately, I managed to follow the doctor’s orders for just twenty-four hours. At that point in my running career, I was so driven to progress and improve that I would let almost nothing stand in my way. On the second day after my doctor visit, I started running again. I found that I could twist my left foot so absurdly that I put pressure only on the outer edge, not on the bottom. In this manner I avoided metatarsal pain.
Somehow I persisted in this manner, running 5 to 8 miles a day, for ten days. I thought I was making progress. Until the day my foot exploded in pain midrun. By the time I got home, it had ballooned in size, and turned a very swollen black and blue. I could barely tug my shoe off.
Now I had no choice but to stop running entirely, and take six weeks off. During that time my foot healed perfectly, and I trained myself back to top shape in just three to four weeks of renewed running.
Several years later I injured my gluteus maximus (a butt muscle) by running a 3,000-meter steeplechase race I hadn’t trained for. The next day I couldn’t lift my left (hurdling) leg out of bed. I should have rested this injury for several weeks as well, but the Olympic Trials were coming up in two months. I felt that I needed to train hard almost every day.
For that reason my glute never healed, and I had to drop out of the Trials race. This effectively ended my Olympic dream. It was the biggest blow of my entire running career.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, I’ve got an injury now. I’m happy to report that it didn’t come from a training error or another stupid mistake. I simply stubbed a toe in a local trail run. I hit the offending rock hard enough to pitch forward and fall at the side of the trail. Luckily, I landed in soft grass. No knee or hip or elbow injuries from the fall.
But for the rest of the run, I noticed a throbbing in the fourth toe of my right foot. It continued after I got home and iced the area. Three days later, after more ice and ibuprofen, the toe seemed no better. I didn’t feel a sharp pain—not like what I remembered from that march fracture in college. But it continued throbbing. When I placed pressure on the toe, as when I pushed off into the next stride, it spoke to me loud and plain: “That doesn’t feel good. Please don’t do it any more.”
So I didn’t. I rode my recumbent bike at home, because I could do that with a flat, unflexed foot that produced no pain signals. I went to the gym three times a week to increase my strength training. I can always use more of that. After several weeks I found that I could exercise hard on an elliptical machine, because, like the recumbent, it didn’t force me to flex the toe and push off.
I hope you can tell that I’m patting myself on the back. For once I was practicing what I have always preached, and what I have written about in the pages that follow. It gets better.
After three weeks, when the toe was still more reactive than I would have expected, I decided to get an X-ray. Better safe than sorry, right? The X-ray proved completely clean. The radiologist couldn’t detect any small fracture, or even any pooling of fluid as around a serious injury.
This made me mad for a moment. I thought, If there’s nothing wrong with the damn foot, then I’m going to jump back into my training routine. For once, however, I listened to my body—to the signals coming from the farthest reach of my body. The toe still hurt. It didn’t want me to start running yet.
But now it said that walking would be OK. A small step forward. I called a friend who had just walked from San Francisco to Mexico and scheduled several pleasant 60-minute walks with him. I also began entering 5K fun runs and walking the entire distance, aiming for a 15-minute pace. I almost but not quite hit my goal.
Two weeks later I did my first run-walk. I covered 2 miles with a 1:1 ratio. My toe felt fine—no pain. I decided to repeat the same workout three times that week, and each of the following four weeks. I would progress from 1 mile to 2 to 4 to 6 to 8, always with the same 1:1 ratio.
I’ve just completed my first 8-miler. Because I’m getting back in the groove, it felt better than the first 2-miler. That’s the way a running comeback should feel. You get smoother, easier, stronger all at the same time. In the next month I’ll gradually ratchet up the run-walk ratio. In two months I expect to be running at almost full strength again.
Here’s what I’ve learned from this process:
The Rolling Stones sang that “time, time, time is on my side. Yes it is.” The words turn out to be true for runners recovering from injury. You need only give time free rein to work its magic.