The Injury That Ends Running Careers (It’s Not What You Think)

[00:00:00] We all know someone who says, I used to run, maybe it’s a coworker, a friend, your father-in-law, your grandpa, et cetera. They did a 5K once, maybe trained for a half marathon, then something happened, a knee thing, hin thing, and now they used to run. Here’s something wild to think about. Nobody plans their last run.

[00:00:20] It’s not dramatic. It’s a Tuesday. Something hurts a little bit more than usual. You take a few days off and then a week, and then you just don’t come back. And now. You are somebody that you used to run or something like that. I, I had to do that. What you’re gonna learn in this episode or find out and be a better running human, the real reason runners quit.

[00:00:41] It’s not the injury where injuries happen most. And who gets the hardest, the four stages of an overuse injury. Most runners, they blow way past the first two, and then just get right to three and four. I’m gonna talk about those. And a free training plan to help you run farther and faster with less effort while staying off of that injured list.

[00:00:59] I’m Daren D Lake certified run coach, and I was able to keep running for the last almost 30 years because I used to push through everything, but I learned better and my goal is to give you and a hundred thousand other self-coach runners the same exact decision making tools that I figured out to avoid injury.

[00:01:16] And get 1% better each day, each week, each month, and do dope running things. Let’s get into it. So there’s a study from the British Journal of Sports Medicine that tracked over 600 recreational runners during an eight week training block for a four mile race. Nothing crazy. Begin a friendly program. Three runs a week in just eight weeks though.

[00:01:36] One in four got injured, not felt a little tight, not had a nag or as British people say, a nickel, I don’t like that word. They were injured. They had to stop or cut back for at least a day. Here’s why. Think of your body like a house renovation. Your heart and lungs are the contractor. They show up fast, adapt quick, ready to roll and build everything but your tendons.

[00:01:57] Ligaments and bones, all that connective tissue. They’re the permit office, slow bureaucratic government running on their own timeline. We all love the government so your cardio gets fit enough to run more and your lungs. That’s the pulmonary system, but. Your tissues haven’t caught up. You feel ready. Your legs aren’t.

[00:02:16] That gap is where injuries live. You do too much ’cause you think you can actually handle it. The study also found men and women get hurt in different spots. Men mostly knees, obviously not always, and women, lower leg calf and chins. Not always. I know a lot of men with shin splints and I know a lot of women with knee issues, uh, but this is obviously just a study, but knowing where injuries happen doesn’t help if you don’t know when you’re heading towards one or what to do when you feel something coming.

[00:02:43] The injury recovery trap, so here’s where I’ve found runners with. Out a framework mess up with injury and recovery. They feel something happening and think they’re just tight. So they stretch, more foam roll, they ice it. Maybe throw on some of that fancy KT tape. Uh, the Thera massage Gun. Gotta have that.

[00:03:01] And they just hope for the best. That’s like taking. Advil for cancer. It treats symptoms but not the root cause. To actually fix injuries long term, you need three things. I found out over many, many years. You need one patience with the process. It takes four to six weeks to see results for most injuries.

[00:03:19] And 12 to 16 weeks or more for tendon related injuries. I’ve had a calf injury. It’s been years of me getting better months and then years, and it’s like I’m better and then it goes back. But you need a long time basically to fully come back. Your body doesn’t care about your race, calendar or your goals.

[00:03:36] It’s gonna come back on its own timeline. Number two, you need to know what specific questions to ask specialists. This is so you don’t waste time and money. For those professionals on generic advice, that doesn’t apply to your situation. ’cause you really don’t have enough time. And this goes to number three, the time you need to spend with them.

[00:03:53] You need to research to fill in the gap. So the specialists, they can’t tell you everything. It’s literally impossible. They spent years, decades learning the stuff, doing this stuff, and they can’t be super individual for you and your situation. Explain how everything works. In a 30 minute meeting appointment session with them hour long even, it’s just impossible.

[00:04:12] You have to educate yourself and fill in those gaps again to get the most out of their experience. Just like bamboo healing and recovery is happening underground, even when you can’t feel it yet. So I go over all of that, that framework stuff, and more in a free email course that will help you. Avoid injury and run farther and faster with less effort.

[00:04:32] It’s called the 1% Better Injury Method. It’s again, a free course. You get six lessons that hit your inbox, five minutes or less every three days, and it teaches you how to actually fix things instead of just managing symptoms. A lot of like life advice because you need to figure out how to do that and that a lot of mentality reframing, et cetera, and it’s free.

[00:04:52] It’s like a full masterclass. Get it at the QR code here. Or the link below in the episode description or the show notes if you’re listening on the podcast player. And what would really help me, if you wanna do something that’s super easy, just drop me a comment and let me know what’s the one injury that messed with your running the most.

[00:05:08] I want to know, I wanna see what the, like general consensus of different injuries and then how people got over them, didn’t get over them, et cetera. Uh, just taking like a big audit of it. It’s always fun to do this. I’m sorry I’m not making fun and, and having fun with your injury, but you get what I’m saying.

[00:05:22] Alright, let’s go into the four stages of injury. ’cause this is where it gets real and this is how we pivot and make sure the injuries don’t get worse. Here we go. So overuse injuries don’t show up outta nowhere. They build and they follow a pattern. Overuse injuries are the most common injuries in running.

[00:05:41] They are chronic injuries, so they were round and then you just compounded and they got worse and worse Acute injuries. Or you twisted your ankle, you got hit by, hopefully you didn’t get hit by a bus or car, or a bicycle or something. You know, you fall off, uh, you know, a side, you, you fall down. Those are acute injuries.

[00:05:58] Most running injuries, they can be prevented. They are chronic and they are overuse. Stage one, you feel something at the start of a run or that first step out of bed. You’re like, Ooh. But it doesn’t go away. Once you warm up two, three days later, it’s still the same. Hasn’t gotten better. No big deal, right?

[00:06:15] Enter stage two. Pain disappears during warmup, but it comes back towards the end of your run. Hmm. You finish stretch a bit, tell yourself you’ll foam run later. You probably don’t, or you do, and it still doesn’t get better. Stage three. The pain doesn’t leave. It’s there the whole run. You adjust your stride without knowing it.

[00:06:35] You compensate and pretend it’s fine. It’s not. Your body is now, again, changing how you run and how you move, and you don’t even know it’s all happening in the background, and that causes second and third order problems that you’ll meet soon enough that. Right knee injury will end up causing some sort of a calf or left hip injury.

[00:06:54] It’s really weird. Stage four pain at rest. You are cooked, absolutely cooked. You’re not running, and you might not run for weeks, maybe months. Most runners don’t act until stage three, but then you sideline and you’re Googling. How long do shin splints take to heal and doom scrolling. Reddit threads from 2017.

[00:07:13] The goal is to catch it at stage one, maybe stage two, and that’s where you still have options. Here’s what to do if you’re at stage one and stage two. Cut your volume by 30 to 50% for three to five days. Don’t go down to zero. Just less. And you know what the best thing to do is cut volume, do easy runs, drop the hard sessions.

[00:07:33] Usually hill sessions and speed work can aggravate most injuries. So just drop it down, keep running, keep the habit going. If it’s lower leg, we want to do strength training immediately at three sets of 25 slow ec. Calf raises daily. Calf raises usually help a lot of stuff below the knee and the foot.

[00:07:51] Again, this is not any advice you need to go to a specialist. This is just information and fun only. I don’t know your situation. I have not put hands on you. I’m not certified to put hands on you or qualified, so go see a professional. This is just general knowledge, if it’s knee or above. Try to do body weight squats if you can, or some sort of good mornings.

[00:08:10] Or single leg deadlifts, or if you have a lightweight or something, five 10 kilos. Five 10 pounds, that’s light for you. Do a goblet style deadlift, uh, or even a lunge. I’ve also found that doing isometric holds, so that’s like holding a squat or a wall sit. For 15 to 20 seconds doing two or three sets of those, those can help certain injuries.

[00:08:30] Obviously, if it’s above the knee, the quad or the hip, that can help. Or if you want to do a calf raise, hold if it’s below for 15 to 20 seconds, that helps with Achilles or calf issues. If they’re feeling tight, the isometric holds and they don’t put a lot of strain on you and they won’t like make you feel worse.

[00:08:47] So it’s really good to do after run, before a run the middle of the day if you’re feeling tight and it’s just a tiny bit sore. If this doesn’t improve in one to two weeks. Go see a physical therapist or physiotherapist. Don’t wait till stage three. So how do you learn your own patterns before they become problems?

[00:09:03] So back to a story about how I used to ignore all the warning signs. I was young, kind of dumb. I thought I was invincible, as we all do in our late twenties, early thirties. And if something hurt, I’d run on it to test it. Decent strategy, right? Sometimes it works, sometimes it didn’t. I had a chronic achilles tendinopathy on both sides.

[00:09:23] And here’s a side note. Uh, this is something that people get wrong a lot. It’s not Achilles tendonitis because it’s usually not inflamed, the collagen fibers of most tendons. You can also have a hamstring tendinopathy. You could have any place where there’s tendons. Those collagen fibers are literally breaking down.

[00:09:40] Unfortunately they don’t come back. They don’t, it’s degenerative. They don’t generate like muscle tissue does. It’s a different beast for a different fix. So again, we just call it tendinopathies in most places now rather than tendonitis. So I’ll have the quick fix for Achilles tendinopathy very shortly.

[00:09:55] Just give me like 20 seconds, but every time I got super fit, ready to crush my best time and erase my Achilles. Would be very, very angry at me. Sideline again, over and over and over. It was soul crushing, but I learned. I did the boring work. I was in the gym, or at least I was at home doing calf raises. I bought kettlebells and weights to do the calf raises, eccentric calf raises literally two to three times a week.

[00:10:18] Never ever skipped them. I made sure I did four sets on both legs every week, minimum. Tried to do five and six if I could always warmed up a lot and eccentric means that I was going down slowly. Four sets, 10 to 15, sometimes 10 to 20, depending on the weight. All different types of calf rays, soleis, leg bent, all different types.

[00:10:39] I was on it. I also took 15 to 20 grams of collagen peptide. Powder and that is a bit in the gray area of whether it works or not. Some studies that I’ve found, some scientists have said that collagen with strength training does help, uh, tendons, especially Achilles tendons. I found that it does help me and I get nice skin and nice hair, even though I am bolt, uh, but my hair does look nice.

[00:11:03] And then I was able to figure out what I could handle and what would actually wreck me. So I found out hill sprints. Would kill me. So I was like, you know what? Back down in the hill, sprints, back down on the strides, back down on too many plyometrics. All those things they pinged. My Achilles volume was okay.

[00:11:17] I could run long and slow. That was fine. It’s like learning to cook on a new stove. You have to burn yourself a few times before you figure out which burners run hot and which ones don’t. Your injury isn’t my injury though, so this is all for informational purposes only. Go see your own specialist. Put hands on.

[00:11:33] You see you get a real plan of action to come back. A real gym routine. I’m not special. I just got tired of being hurt and I finally started listening to my body and all the other stuff I was researching. So what’s the best way to avoid injury? Doing a proper base phase in your running season. You can do that by getting my free 30 day based training plan.

[00:11:54] This also will help you run farther and faster with less effort without destroying your body in the process sequence 30 days. This also sprinkles in strength training, plyo strides, rest days, mental stuff, everything you need. Get it for free at the QR code here or the link below in the description. And you know what?

[00:12:13] Drop another comment. If you can tell me what your body’s early warning signs are and what the little signal is that gives you like a uhoh. Maybe I should. Back down. Maybe I should do this before things get worse. I love to hear all that stuff too. ’cause everyone is different. I can take maybe something from you.

[00:12:29] Remember that study from earlier? Here is a stat that stuck with me of the novice, early beginner runners who got injured during that eight week period. 48% never came back. Not during the program, not for the race they signed up for. They just stopped. Running. That’s almost half. And if you expand the definition of injury to include any pain from running, even stuff that didn’t force them to stop, 60% of runners were dealing with something more than half were carrying around an ache.

[00:12:57] They didn’t even count a little thing of probably nothing. A stage one. They talk themselves out of worrying about, here’s what I think happens with all this stuff. The injury doesn’t end running careers. The identity crisis does. When you’re new, you don’t have proof, you can come back. You haven’t survived the sep.

[00:13:12] Back yet. So when one hits, it doesn’t feel like a speed bump. It feels like evidence that the universe is out to get you and tell you that you are not a runner. After all, experienced runners, they’ve been through it. That knee thing, that shin thing, the Achilles thing, years for me, with the Achilles thing, the, I didn’t run for 12 weeks and I actually figured out how to cycle and swim quite well.

[00:13:32] I came back, they came back so. We all know that we can ’cause we went through it. Novice, beginner runners, they don’t have that yet and that’s why so many of them don’t return. Alright, if you haven’t already, grab my free training plan so you can sort your base training out. Run farther and faster with less effort and obviously.

[00:13:50] Avoid that injury stuff because you’ll get signed up automagically for the email course two, that’s five minutes or less to read it. You’ll get six lessons over 18 days, and it’s all like a step-by-step framework for you to live and run a 1% better. Life. I’m all about the 1% variables. 1% changes. That’s it.

[00:14:11] It’s so simple when you think of it like that. Knowing what an injury is though, that’s half of it. Preventing them and lowering the risk is what makes you bulletproof. And a big part of that is strength training. Go watch my 10 best workouts for runners in the least amount of time. ’cause ain’t nobody got time for that.

[00:14:26] Gym stuff, running stuff, life stuff. It’s crazy. The link is below if you’re on YouTube or in the show notes. If you’re listening or watching on Spotify or somewhere else, go get that link. Go watch that. Train smart race, easy.