The back of the shirt that I received for running the Utah Valley Marathon reads: "Pain you enjoy."
It's a great tagline. After twenty-plus years of participating in competitive sports, I've become well acquainted with the reality and wisdom of that phrase. If you're working hard -- whether it's in a competition or in practice -- it's often going to hurt. Your lungs huff, your muscles burn, your joints ache, you might even bleed. And, most of the time, that pain all works toward making you a better, stronger, tougher competitor.
But when is pain bad?
That's a question that I've struggled with throughout my athletic career. When does pain cross the line from good and productive to detrimental? If you're not comfortable living close to that line, you're not going to improve as much as you can. At the same time, if you don’t respect the far side of that line, then you may find yourself sidelined for an extended period of time.
I recently ignored the far side of that line. After my best 5K performance to date, I woke the next day with pain in my Achilles and a slight hobble. What did I do? I went out for a hard, fast, hilly 18-mile run. By the end of that run my hobble was a limp. Short periods of rest did little and I couldn't shake the pain as I continued to train for my first marathon.
The short story is that I was barely able to train over the final month and though I completed the marathon (that experience is a whole other story), it was far from the Boston-Marathon-qualifying time that I was hoping for.
After the marathon though, I pledged to give myself the time needed to heal. I didn't run a step for two and a half weeks, skipped out of multiple races, and restarted my training easy, short, and slow. Now, I'm back to running sans Achilles pain. That's the upshot. The downside is that a month of half-effort training and almost three weeks of no running at all means that I now need to spend a lot of time building back up to the 50-plus mile weeks that I was at before.
So the big question, of course, is how to avoid the lousy fate of losing precious training time and progress to an injury that you exacerbated by trying to train through the pain. Here are three pointers that I think can go a long way.
1) Mindfulness
That word can do wonders for almost anything in your life, but for our purposes here, every athlete that's competed and trained for any reasonably long period of time should have a pretty good sense for what training soreness feels like and what an injury feels like. Sometimes it can be tricky, but often times, if you're paying close attention to how your body feels, you can easily identify whether that tweak in your quad is just the ache of a great set of squats or whether you've pulled, torn, or twisted something that will need a couple days to heal. If you don’t take the time to tune into the pain and interpret it, you run the risk of turning a few days of healing into a few months.
2) Know the consequences
It's usually mentally painful for any serious athlete to take time off from their training. You have to deal with thoughts of losing ground on competitors or simply not having the opportunity to continue pushing yourself forward in the ultimate competition with yourself and your own limits. But if you ignore the early signs of an injury and sideline yourself for months, you will lose a heck of a lot more ground than if you took a few days right away to let the then-minor injury repair itself.
3) Be prepared
Following from No. 2, it's easier to deal with the mental anguish of not doing your primary training if you are prepared with cross-training alternatives that won't stress your injury. In my case, swimming, biking, and pool running were all great options to keep up my cardio and muscular endurance without banging my bodyweight down on my Achilles. A lifter with a deltoid tweak, meanwhile, could spend a week working on their core and legs while giving their shoulders some restorative rest.
I'd like to end this by saying that I hope that you never get injured -- and certainly I do. But injury is pretty much an inevitability when you're a hard-working athlete, so instead, I'll wish you the wisdom to know when it's time to back off, and a speedy recovery for every time you do take a hit.
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