Has this ever happened to you? You train for a marathon, you feel as though you are peaking at just the right time, you've even just started your taper...and then you got injured. What should you do?
Runners can be very stubborn. When I was in high school, I tried talking my coach into letting me race with a broken ankle once. I even purposefully didn't get it x-rayed for a week so that I'd have a chance to race. The fact is, though, that sometimes racing is just going to do more damage and when you weigh the risks versus the rewards it just doesn't make sense.
You always need to bear one thing in mind in situations like this. They'll make another marathon. The marathon is a distance that you need to respect.
I cringe when I hear of doctors that discourage exercise. I can think of nothing better for somebody than to run. If your doctor ever suggests that you quit running without a really good reason, you may want to consider finding a new one or at least questioning the doctor pretty closely before following through on his "advice."
The biggest problem of course comes when you really are hurt. As runners, we tend to be pretty set with our tunnel vision and don't want to skip runs, but sometimes the choice literally might be between a month off or a year off depending upon whether we take the rest our body is telling us we need or if we keep running anyway and wind up doing further damage.
There are two things to bear in mind when you are overcoming an injury. First, you need to give your body the rest that it needs in order to recover. That may or may not involve a complete stop to your daily or weekly runs depending upon the injury, but it will almost certainly require that you at least decrease the duration and intensity of your workouts.
The second trick to overcoming your injury is to determine what caused the injury in the first place. If you do not know what caused your injury, then you are very likely to just get injured again as soon as you restart your training regimen.
Any time that I start to feel any aches or pains, I look immediately at my shoes to determine if they are at fault. Are the shoes that I've been wearing appropriate to the kind of shape that I am in and the sort of workouts that I am doing? How many miles do they have on them, and are they ready to be replaced? Often times, you can solve most of your problems by replacing old shoes or shoes that are not appropriate for your body type. Problems with your feet can manifest themselves in your legs or even in your hips.
If the shoes are not what is at fault, then the next likely cause will be the way that you are training. If you increase the duration or the intensity of your training before your body has had an opportunity to adapt itself to a level that can handle those sorts of workouts, then you are almost always going to hurt yourself.
Especially going into an endurance race like the marathon, it is almost better to be a little undertrained than a little overtrained.
Author Resource:-
Blaine Moore is a running coach in Southern Maine with 20 years of training and racing experience. Download his free report, The 3 Components of an Effective Workout, to learn why the work you put in during your training is only the third most important factor that determines how well you improve as a runner and an athlete.
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