Elite observations: Training with an injury
- Details
- Created on Tuesday, 01 March 2011 07:00
- Written by Tommy Manning
By TOMMY MANNING
Editor’s note: Manning is a math teacher and cross country coach at Fountain Valley School who finished 18th this month in the World Mountain Running Championships. He will provide periodic tips — all of which can be found here on OutThereColorado.com.
For various reasons I have not enjoyed a full week of training in more than three weeks. Injury, sickness and unusual circumstances such as taking a student to the ER for an appendectomy have affected my training.
I hurt my toe two weeks ago, and I mean I really hurt it. I had to take three days off of running, and it still hurts two weeks later. I have been lucky with injuries throughout most of my running career, however.
Thinking about injuries leads to the following questions: What do we do when we have an injury? Do we take time off? Can we still train when we’re injured? How do we train?
The first thing you need to do when you experience pain is differentiate between injury and discomfort. All runners are going to have discomfort and all runners will feel their knees or shins or hips bothering them at some time. Novice and recreational runners might think discomfort is an injury and take time off. Most veteran runners know the difference and will run through discomfort and only take time off for a true injury.
Previous blog entries: Find your running store ... Winter speed workouts ... Quick post-race recovery ... Long-term recovery ... Mental side of training ... Variety key in training ... Typical training plan
Very few people (elites and some hard-core runners) will run through any kind of pain and even run through injuries, which only makes them worse. If you do have an injury, you need to take time off from running. Luckily, there are several cross training options to keep you in shape while you are not running.
Now, none of these activities will replace running. As I read on a different blog recently, 100 miles cycling equals 0 miles running and 1,000 miles cycling still equals 0 miles running. What you can do is increase your heart rate, work your cardiovascular system and keep from losing all of your fitness.
Cycling is a great cross training activity. Of course, it matters what your injury is. With some knee or hip injuries, you don’t want to spin over and over again on a bike and aggravate the injury. For other injuries, cycling is a great non-impact way of working out and staying in shape.
The key is to have variety like you do in running: easy days, long days and hard days (fartleks). The cycling to running ratio is somewhere between 2.5:1 and 4:1, meaning if you normally run 50 miles per week, you should cycle 125-200 miles per week to get the same cardiovascular workout. I prefer to go by time. If my long run is two hours, then I ride two hours. By then my butt is sore anyway. And if my hard day was supposed to be 800-meter repeats, then I might do 3-minute intervals on the bike. I’m not a great cyclist, so that workout certainly wears me out.
Swimming is an excellent entire-body workout. Again, depending on your injury, the pool might not be the best thing though. Swimming is great because it works your lower and upper body, and if one gets tired you can just pull or just kick for a while. Personally, I like aqua jogging because I still go through the running motion, have no impact, but do have water resistance. After my last real injury, I spent the entire summer aqua jogging in a pool. I had too much pain to run outside, but aqua jogging was fine. This kept me in shape and I worked on biomechanics a lot, which helped keep running specific muscles strong.
Elliptical machines or Stairmasters are popular cross training activities. I’m not a huge fan of cross training like this though. I feel if you are healthy enough to be doing these activities, then you are healthy enough to run. The exception is for someone rehabilitating an injury who doesn’t have full range of motion or cannot put full body weight on their legs. After my first knee surgery, I was on a Stairmaster a lot trying to gain full range of motion and strengthen my leg. My leg was very weak, I worked out at a very low level, and it definitely helped.
Keep your fingers crossed and stay healthy. If you do happen to encounter a running injury, know there are several options for you.
Weather
Current Contests
