A helpful framing method is to think about injury the way you might think about diseases with strong lifestyle risk factors—there are genetic components, but much of what happens is under your control. Someone trying to lower her risk for coronary artery disease would make certain choices, such as eating a diet low in saturated fat, not smoking, exercising regularly, and maintaining a good weight. Similarly, you can strongly control the risk factors for running injury through such choices as maintaining a good balance between hard and easy efforts, running on level, soft surfaces when possible, maintaining good muscle and joint strength and flexibility, ditching broken-down running shoes, and so on.