Two years ago, almost to the day, I was coming to terms with my first serious running injury: a stress fracture in my left shin. The repercussions of that injury have been significantly more complex than I anticipated as I was forced to acknowledge having put myself at risk of REDs (Relative Energy Deficiency in sport). I’m still learning how to fuel properly and safely, and still making mistakes, as I demonstrated far too well during VOGUM last year! It turns out that I am also still learning how to properly heal my leg, and still making mistakes there too.
I’ve had a niggle back in my left lower leg for a while. It’s been a weak area ever since I injured it, and perhaps unsurprisingly, I had just learned to live with it. Part of recovery, after all, is learning when a niggle is just a niggle, and not getting too jumpy every time something feels a little off. Plenty of good stretching felt like the right answer, it didn’t feel worse when I ran, it was just a quiet difference in my body that I lived with.
Only on Tuesday morning my leg stopped quietly whispering at me and gave a shout instead. I had driven to Cosmeston for a much needed trail run, my brain desperately crying out for an escape from the city, from everyday life, and for the level of focused concentration that I can only find on trails. The niggle was still there, as it had been for a couple of months now, but no more than that. Right up to the moment when I started to run. Those first few steps, still in the car park, felt tight and painful in a way I hadn’t experienced in two years, and I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a rather loud voice in my head telling me to stop immediately. But there was a louder voice telling me that I did not have a hope of getting through this week without that run. So I rationalised, told myself I was running on soft ground for most of the run, and just kept going.
In that moment there was no other decision open to me. I know that, even now, I would do the same thing, and indeed as the run went on I was convinced I’d made the right decision all round: my leg pain was easing, and I felt so much calmer than I had done before I ran. Those feelings, physical and emotional, lasted long enough for me to put my kit back on later in the day and head over to my Tuesday evening running session with Run Grangetown. I was aware that my leg was extremely tight, and intended to take it easy, but the moment we started a very gentle jog in the warm up I realised that I simply couldn’t run on it at all. It hurt now, and had stopped working properly. This was not, it turns out, a little niggle that could be ignored.
A couple of days later I was back in the familiar surroundings of Pete’s physiotherapy room, terrified that I was about to be sent off for another x-ray for another suspected stress fracture. Instead, I left half an hour later with a good understanding of how and why my soleus muscle isn’t doing what it should, a plan to fix that, and the reassurance that I wasn’t looking at a stress response injury. I’d caught it in time, done the right thing, and should be back up and running in a few weeks. The relief was incredible.
It would be very easy at this point to give myself a telling off. There were multiple moments where I could have stopped and asked for help before I got to the point of needing to actually stop running for a while; I knew something was wrong almost straight away on Tuesday morning, yet I still went ahead and ran. But I’m not going to do that to myself. As I talked it through with Pete he helped me to see that the decisions I had made were the right ones at the time, that I’d still been looking after myself in the best way that I could. None of us go out for a run planning to come home injured, yet it happens to most runners at some point in their lives.
As with every other aspect of life, attempting to run injury free requires us to manage risk. Eradicating the chance of injury is impossible, so we do what we can to mitigate it: we buy shoes that fit properly and support us; we warm up carefully, stretch out afterwards; we fuel properly, and rest when we need to do. Above all else, we learn to listen to our bodies. So when those injuries do occur (hopefully rarely, and in a very minor way), we have a choice. We can rail against it and blame ourselves, or we can accept that life is complicated, that by mitigating some risks we might exacerbate others, and that to be injured is not a sign of failure.
A period of enforced rest and recovery is not what I wanted in my life right not. But neither is it something that is going to eat away at me, another voice of nagging self doubt that focuses on where I went wrong. Injuries happen, despite everything we do to avoid them. They are a reminder of our physicality, and yes our vulnerability, but they are also a reminder of how strong we are, and how well we can bounce back, again and again and again.
I Run Free 