Life lessons from the injury rollercoaster

Dear Reader, you can see patterns in anything if you look for long enough. My soon to be year of running injured looks like the rolling hills of an inevitable eliptical workout. But am I on a downslope or an upslope? It looks like I should be at my lowest, but I feel hopeful. A disclaimer: here be lessons, but… never take advice from someone who’s falling apart.

This chart is from my garmin account. I deleted strava before christmas when the tops of my feet starting hurting as well as my knees, and jealousy turned into loathing for everyone out there running ten miles like it was nothing special. No more sharing of photos and wildlife spotting for me. Just an obsessive list of private, unfiltered thoughts on how each run went and why.

My garmin notes run in cycles: celebration! commiseration! mystification! A good run might be because I did my strength exercises the day before. A bad run might be because I was tired from my strength exercises. Or because I didn’t do them. I warmed up. I did too much warm up. It was early. It was late. I was desperately searching for clues as to why my feet and knees were hurting.

At christmas, I pushed running to the back of my mind like crusty trainers in the shoe cupboard. I dug them out and saw the physio (again) in January. Her opinion was a surprise: I was doing better. My glutes and hamstrings were stronger, nothing seemed seriously wrong. She asked if I’d been doing anything different, and I said I’d been going to group cycling (spin) classes. Actually I had wondered if that’s why the tops of my feet hurt. Her advice: stop the cycling and see if that helped.

It did.

I had been making a pattern where there wasn’t one. Assuming that my ankles were sore because of my knee pain. But maybe, they weren’t connected. This week I ran my first 10k without pain in two months. I started the week planted to the sofa by a cold. Ran 4 miles on Thursday, also without pain, then on Friday I went to the gym for a couple of hours. I mixed cardio with strength, and finished with *proper weights*: deadlifts and back squats on the lifting platform. Swam 40 lengths with Martha on Saturday, ran 6.2 miles on Sunday. Is this the beginning of a good pattern?

It feels too early to say, but it’s not too soon to share one thing: building strength is the cure. I’ve done a few months of regular homework: split squats with a 5kg weight in each hand; hamstring curls on a swiss ball. The other day I realised that I can almost do a single-leg squat now – something that would have been unthinkable for my shaky ankles and creaky knees a year ago. Building strength for the functional movements of life can only help. This week’s gym session was my third *proper* session and the first where I felt really good. Strong. Like I belonged.