How to Tame Running Injuries?

If you’re an amateur runner who has been plagued by minor and annoying injuries, you’re not alone. These are not the kind of injuries that force you to go to the hospital, but the kind of muscular / nervous issues that cause you to pause your running campaign for days, weeks, or even months. I was one of those, until I decided to do something to resolve the issue. I tried a whole host of remedies that I could source from the plethora of information available these days. In this post, I’m sharing with you, what worked the most for me.

The Background

I’ve been running for over a decade now, and have been an amateur runner through and through. I used to run around 30 kilometers a week (km/week) at a pace of around 6 minutes per kilometer (mins/km). In the last couple of years, the urge to improve struck me, and I started pushing both mileage and pace.

The Issue

After the urge, I quickly increased my mileage up to around 70 km/week. Small injuries kept hindering me again and again, especially when I was trying to push for pace. Whenever I got under 5 mins/km, it turned out to be yet another annoying injury. It was first the knee, then calf, then shank, then thigh, then the groin, and then the back. You name it. They all came one after another. What’s worse, with age, the recovery was taking longer.

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The Observation

Once when I was training uphill sprints with a friend of mine, he noticed and described to me, how one calf of mine looked much thinner and less trained than the other one. We even checked my squat position, and it was very asymmetrical. That is when it struck us. Could it be that I should start working on symmetrical performance? It is a well-known fact that the human body is not symmetrical at all. But I wanted to push for symmetrical performance and see the results for myself.

The Action

I started training both sides of my body separately (particularly the legs). I started with the leg press, then pistol squats, and eventually onto other more complex workouts. I also tried to achieve strength symmetry between my back muscles and my abdominal muscles. In the past, I had predominantly only trained my abs, which made my back more vulnerable.  This helped improve my mileage without injuries. I was quite excited by these results. Then I started pushing for pace as well, and wham! I almost immediately faced another injury. Rather demotivated, I thought I was mixing up causation and correlation. After recovery, I kept to my slow pace and 50 km/week mileage. This seemed to work for me. The idea was to very slowly scale my pace, being very careful not to risk injuries. Initially, I felt searing pain through my legs whenever I pushed. This time, I took the risk, and just kept on pushing, until I powered through. Let me stress again that I was taking a risk here. I did not stop running, when I was feeling medium level pain in my legs.

When doing the 50 km/week mileage, I became more conscious about my body movements, and how my body reacted to my actions. Then I started focusing on my steps very mindfully. I realized rather quickly that no matter I much I train my legs separately, I’m landing one leg heavier than the other. It didn’t matter much how I trained, if my execution was this asymmetrical. That was it. From this point on, I became more mindful of each step, and tried to load both legs equally whenever I was walking, jogging or running. The image shows my mileage from the end of 2019 to date (November 2020). And you can see how I became much more consistent after this realization, and execution. There have been minor hiccups along the way, but by and large, I am much more confident now, and there have been almost no issues even when I pushed upto the 04:15 mm:ss/km pace.

Conclusion

While this works for me very well currently, there is no guarantee that this is a silver bullet for everyone facing running injuries. But I see no problems with one being more mindful about how he or she loads his or her body during running, or any other physical activity for that matter. Let me know of any interesting experiences you’ve made along your running journey in the comments section below.

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