Tag: injury

Returning after injury

At some stage, every runner picks up an injury or illness or even just stops running for a few months. Typically when they restart they try to get back up to their old mileage and paces quickly. Particularly with an injury this isn’t smart. You have to rebuild carefully from small beginnings and extend the runs as the fitness returns. The last thing you add back is intensity.

To give an example of how it should look, I’m going to rewind to when I last had a notable break.  It was 2018 – over five years ago and as I documented in my running streak I’ve barely taken any time off since then. The only notable breaks were taking a few days off to taper into and recover from a half marathon.

At the start of year I was running really well. I’d cracked the endurance conundrum and found myself comfortably running for 8-9 hours each week and covering 60-65 miles. I had organically built this mileage up and it all felt very comfortable. In fact, in late 2017 I’d been trying to limit myself to 8hrs per week but I began to feel like I wasn’t getting any benefit and needed to do more.

You can see from the Strava data that my mileage was consistently high through Jan-Feb as I prepared for an April half marathon. March began to taper down and then I had a minor accident slipping on some ice. I believe this was the beginning of the injury I had that summer. The half marathon went badly and when I returned to running afterwards I had some pains and while I hoped to be able to run through these, by the end of May I had to admit defeat and accept I needed to let the injury recover.

I had some kind of core injury which stopped me from doing any kind of sporting activity. I don’t believe there’s been a longer phase in my life where I was inactive than the following two months through June and July. With the core being literally the core, there was nothing I could do, I couldn’t go swing a golf club, I could barely do garden work. I just rested.

People I spoke to wonder how I was surviving without being able to go exercise. They know how it dominates my life yet I was quite comfortable sitting in a chair and reading, waiting for it to heal. Despite barely eating over the next two months I put on almost twenty pounds with the activity and my waistline went up a couple of inches. No-one would have accused me of being fat but I was bigger.

My one deference to the inactivity was a weekly lap of the road I live on. Being a crescent, it’s a very convenient loop so I would run a single lap each Sunday to see if the injury was still affecting me. Each week, I would discover it was still painful despite running for less than three minutes at a slow pace.

Eventually though, one day I sensed a difference and felt ready to return. Here’s what my training return looked like:

Week 1 
Mon 
Tues2min test – the green light to restart
Weds15 min run
Thurs 
Fri14 mins30
Sat16 mins30
Sun 
  
Total4 runs totalling 48mins

Having felt good on the Tuesday test I was excited to restart. So I began with a single fifteen minute run. On reflection, possibly even this was too long and it should only have been 5-10minutes but it didn’t present issues. To be on the safe side, I took a rest day on Thursday and then ran again on Friday. I ran the same route and came in thirty seconds faster. I then ran again the next day and as I was a little quicker again, I tacked on an extra 400m loop of my road to take it past fifteen minutes. That was it for the week. Three main runs of fifteen minutes and lots of recovery time.

Remember I had been running an hour every day for weeks on end less than six months previously so it’s a huge cutdown.

Week 2 
Mon15 mins
Tues30 mins
Weds 
Thurs35 mins
Fri15 mins
Sat33 mins – hilly parkrun
Sun 
  
Total5 runs totalling 2hr04

I had some coaching working to do on Monday so I ran the warm-up and had some aches and pains until I got going. Given that’s the case, I now question why I did a thirty minute run the next day but this is the curse of the returning runner. Wanting to pick back up sooner than they should. Sensibly I then took a rest day.

On the Thursday, I ran a fairly flat route and still had some pains but usually only at the beginning of runs. The Friday was a short recovery run.

On Saturday I went back to parkrun. I ran 33mins which is about 10min30/mile and my notes states “hardly an ache at this pace”.  That’s the key with all injury recovery – you have to stay ‘below’ the injury. Certainly in terms of pace but also duration. If the injury starts to flare at a particular pace or after a certain distance, you back off to build the fitness you can without worsening matters.

Anyway I was very pleased to have now achieved two weeks of training without relapse.

Week 3 
Mon45 mins on the flat – dedicated 4.5 mile route
Tues20 mins recovery
Weds45 mins on the flat – dedicated 4.5 mile route
Thurs30 mins on the flat
Fri 
Sat29 min parkrun – 4 mins quicker than last week
Sun1hr22 long run – dedicated 7.5 mile route
  
Total6 runs totalling 4hr14

Following the Sunday rest day, I went for a run on the prom at the beach. It was a forty-five minute effort and my notes state it wasn’t enjoyable. I guess because I’d managed to run for two weeks without injury returning I felt I now had to just rebuild. Running is always tough when your fitness is lacking so I just felt I had to go through it. Note I still did a short recovery run the next day and generally ran in the flattest places possible to keep intensity to a minimum.

After another Friday rest day, I knocked 4-mins off my parkrun despite trying no harder and then on the Sunday went for a long run. It was tough. It started out quite slow and the ‘new territory’ of the last three miles had me running at 11min30/mile pace – for some that may not seem that slow but consider I was capable of running close to 6min/mile at the start of the year.

Week 4 
Mon20mins Recovery
Tues40mins Steady
 30mins including 10mins faster (coaching)
Weds20mins – Recovery AM
 20mins – Recovery PM
Thurs40min Recovery
Fri 
Sat30mins at Chichester parkrun
Sun40min recovery
  
Total6 runs totalling 4hr23

The following week I continued running and managed to do six days on the road. I even did a couple of small double sessions on the Tuesday and Wednesday. After a Friday rest, I went to Chichester parkrun as I was visiting friends and ran it in 27mins but on the Sunday morning, after a late night out I had nothing in the tank so only managed a 40-min run.

Training by time – you can see I did much less after returning from injury

By this point I’d completed four weeks and felt confident the injury wasn’t returning. Within a month I was running 23mins at Hasting parkrun and training continued on from there. I slowly rebuilt my running and it was almost six months before I was regularly running eight hours per week again. There simply wasn’t the need until I’d rebuilt my fitness.

I often say to runners who are coming back from injury that it’s better to take a little longer and avoid relapse than to get into a depressing cycle of restart, relapse, sit and wait then restart, relapse, sit and wait …

Of course many don’t want to hear that. They finally feel fit, they have goals, they feel they’re getting older and will lose their speed. Having been patient and unable to run for some time they want to get going again. What they don’t consider is that it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach. The swing between the two extremes of thinking they are either ready to run or still injured. Consequently when they restart, they dive back in rather than testing their fitness step by step.

My advice to any running returning from injury is :

  • Restart with very short runs to test how the affected area responds – run for only 5-15mins.
  • Rest the day after each run to give extra recovery time. If you run the very next day it might be too soon.
  • Don’t be too quick to add on mileage and every time you do, let it consolidate.
  • The last thing you add is intensity – wait until you’ve rebuilt a solid base of running.

In fact, much of the mileage you may have been doing before will have been because of aerobic efficiency. That will naturally return as your fitness rebuilds.

One final thought – when you restart after an injury, invariably you will encounter some pain. Sometimes it is hard to be sure of why this is happening. It could be the injury hasn’t fully healed in which case you have to give it more time. But it could be some scar tissue from the injury healing and this needs to be broken down. How do you know which is which? You can never be sure, so err on the side of caution, take the rehab slowly and see how it proceeds.

Muscles need recovery

The week I tweaked my hamstring I did two big workouts. It was all interval work and I was pushing hard, breathing hard and hitting paces I haven’t seen in a while. It was on the final effort of the second session, that I pumped my legs as hard as possible, hoping to end with a quick time, when the hamstring tightened and knotted.

The following day I ran a careful recovery run; the same again on the day after. The hamstring was already feeling 95% healed and offered no issues on the third day – a long Sunday run. I expected to run quicker than usual after two easy days but, while my legs didn’t feel tired, it wasn’t faster. My heart-rate barely went over 145bpm and although I had the energy, my legs just didn’t have the bounce or verve to go fast.

The next day was totally different. I went for my usual recovery run and my legs were full of power. Now I couldn’t slow down, it was the run I’d hoped to do the day before.

That’s the point of this opening: it had taken 4-6 days to recover from the workouts of the previous week. The hamstring tightening had been a sign I’d already done enough and once that recovered, it still took until the Monday for my legs to be ready to run like I’d hoped they would on the Sunday.

This is where many runners training falls apart – they push too hard, too often – they don’t let their bodies dictate the pace, particularly on their recovery or easy days. I know many runners who would have pushed hard on the Sunday and it would have delayed the recovery further.

A few years ago I became enamoured with doing 8-mile threshold runs. Start off with 15-mins of warm-up then push the pace up to the point where my breathing was on the edge of threshold and force it along for the better part of an hour. Warmdown, recover for two days then repeat the same session again later in the week. On paper, I was doing everything right. I was following the 80-20 rule, I was getting lots of recovery and so on.

For a couple of weeks, it went really well. My pace improved and I began to get faster. Then, on weeks 3 and 4 I saw no improvement. Around the same time my lower back began to tighten up. I went another week with the runs but the aches were increasing. It reached the point where they affected my day-to-day living and reluctantly I concluded I was going to have to back off the running until it subsided. So I went back to easy running and let my body dictate the pace rather than try to force things. Within two weeks everything eased up and I raced a decent 10K.

My experience is not uncommon among runners. At least in the sense that when they overdo things they start to tighten up and get aches and pains. This is the body’s reaction to trying to use muscles that haven’t recovered. It might be felt in the Achilles, it might be in the plantar, I’ve even had it in my shoulders! The only uncommon thing about my experience is that I didn’t whine and complain or put it down to bad luck or old age; I looked at my running and changed my training plan so I was able to train without pain.

This is why keeping recovery days genuinely easy is important, it gives muscles time to recover without putting extra stress in. Most runners are used to their legs aching the day after a run, they might even get some DOMS on the second and, after half and full marathons I’ve still been struggling on days three and four. They understand the need for recovery at those times because it’s obvious. But they rarely understand aches and pains in day-to-day living are general signs of needing recovery. It’s the aggregation of unrecovered muscles being called back into action too soon. Any time I have aches, pains or tightness, I know I’m going to have to back off my training. That doesn’t mean a rest day although it could. It may just be changing a workout to an easy run; it may be delaying it by a day, it may be cutting the workout down.

The moral of the story is muscles need recovery. The more effort you put in, combined with how much you do, dictates how long it’ll take to recover. It can take ten days to recover from a good speed workout. Old runner wisdom says it takes a month to recover from a marathon. While you don’t have to be perfectly fresh to train harder, you do need to listen to your body. Aches, pains and tightness that come from nowhere are always a sign that you’re pushing hard. If you continue to push hard they’ll get worse to the point where you’re forced to let them recover one way or another.