Balancing the Urge to Run

February 4, 2015 by 13 Comments

The road back from an injury can be a long winding one, full of ups and downs and twists and turns.  I find as you travel along this road your greatest companions are determination, belief and patience.

You must have the determination to do the work needed to heal and get stronger.

You must believe you that the work you put into your recovery will pay off.

Ah but patience….there’s the tough one. As the injury starts to heals….as you start to feel “better” the urge to run or to push your runs grows stronger. It’s easy to want to leave patience behind and get back into the game. But go too fast or too hard and you’ll find that road to recovery extending a lot further out in front of you than you want.

patience-is-form-of-wisdom-jon-kabat-zinn

I remind myself of this every time I step on to the treadmill. My knee is definitely healing and I’m definitely feeling anxious as I eye the calendar….but I need to balance the urge to run and train with patience.

The ultimate goal this year is to Thrive not just survive….A slow and steady return will payoff in the end!

 

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Filed Under: injuries, patience, to push or not to push

Are you listening?

September 1, 2011 by 6 Comments

Some days your body is trying to tell you something…the question is…are you listening?

Do you ever have those mornings where body parts are in revolt before you ever roll out of bed and touch one foot to floor? But you shake it off and think…wow I’m stiff this morning – (or, as was the case for me this morning….getting old sucks!)

Then as you move around going through whatever your routine is before heading out the door, those same body parts continue to voice their displeasure with what you’ve got planned – but you wave it off and think I’ll be fine once I get moving.

Now you’re out the door and moving…it’s not pretty at first, but at least your moving. By a mile in, you’ve found a rhythm and you feel like you’ve shown those body parts who’s the boss. But as you start mile 4, the revolt has returned in earnest and you can’t ignore the message that you might have gotten a little carried away with yesterday’s strength training, and that if you don’t want to be walking funny the rest of the day that it’s best to back off the pace…right now!

So you wrap-up your run, much slower than you want, but the rebels are for the moment pacified, content that they got their point across.

Yeah…well that’s pretty much how my run went this morning. Clearly my legs were still feeling the effects of yesterday’s workout and continuing to push today just might not have ended well, and I didn’t want to do anything to risk missing this weekend’s long run.

But it’s always an interesting question for runners – when do you push through and when do you back off?

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Filed Under: general musings, listening to your body, to push or not to push