On Good Pain: Injury Prevention
On Good Pain
If you run and you're normal, your body has a few aches and pains, especially in the morning. Marathoners do a lot of limping and creaking in the morning. Heel and foot pain, joint stiffness, and sore backs are the most common. Pains that go away after you warm up and get moving should not be ignored, but I consider these normal training pains. Ignoring these pains will cause a serious injury.
Even though the pain goes away as you run, you need to treat them. When you finish running, ice the places that hurt before you ran.
TIP! Keep a Styrofoam cup full of water in your freezer. Peel down the foam and it makes for a good applicator. The styrofoam keeps your hand from freezing while you rub on the ice.
Ice for about 5 minutes or until you're frozen. Repeat before you go to sleep. If you don't freeze a cup of water you will blow off icing a sore spot when you shou ld have. It is inc venient to get out ice cubes and put them into something after your run. Freeze a cup now! Ice is the miracle drug of choice. Not icing can lead to bad pain.
If you're not icing at least three parts of your body, you're not training hard enough!
On Bad Pain
If you have a pain creep up during a run and it seems to be getting worse the more you run stop. Do not try to get in even one more mile of your run. Pains that come on during runs can turn into serious injuries if you run throug pain. Stop and walk, or call for a ride. Get to ice immediately. Ice often and take the next day off. The following day try running. If you feel that the pain is coming back, stop before it happens. Go ice it again. Now is the time to forget about your schedule and concentrate on the injury. This is as much a part of marathon training as running miles. Call me and describe the symptoms. It takes many years of bull-headedness to realize a couple days off could be the option to a couple months off. Take the time you would be running, and go read a running injury book at Running Fit.
"When I am ill I become a skeptic. What was hitherto been a certainty becomes perhaps; what has become perhaps becomes maybe; and what was maybe becomes probably not." George Sheehan
A familiar question I receive as we get close to marathon season:
"I have this pain in my knee, hip, Achilles... I have taken two days off and when I went back out today, it seemed worse."
These are the times that try men's souls. Now is the time to control the commitment to your log and weekly totals. Put that energy into patience, healing, and education. The time lost on the road is time gained for other things. Get to a bookstore or to Running Fit. Page through a sports medicine or running injury book. (Nobody buys these books, they just come in and look up their specific injury!) Diagnose your injury and read the suggested course of action. If you don't like what you read, choose another book, get a second opinion. After 20 years of running, I look at injuries as part of the sport and not as something taking me away from my running. What you are doing is learning the limits of your body and how to best deal with them.
"Doctors, like cars and dogs, best be avoided. At least until all avenues of self help are covered. What we are dealing with are diseases of excellence of which most doctors don't understand." George Sheehan
"When a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is usually done from the noblest of motives or while trying to get laid." Oscar Wilde
If you are the type who is obsessed with the week's mileage like I am, print this section and read it over and over again until it sinks into your skullbone.