Running Injuries: What to Know
“XYZ just started hurting! It doesn’t make any sense! I didn’t go up in mileage this week or have any harder than usual workouts!”
Does this sound familiar? It does to me! This is what I hear a lot of at first sessions – the timeline of injury and running volume increases seems like it doesn’t line up. This is because runners are generally looking for immediate cause and effect. If I ran my highest mileage week this week, surely the injury would pop up during that time? Or during my hardest workout of the training cycle?
But this is not how all injuries behave!
Generally, injuries will show up after 3-4 weeks of increased running volume in any given training block. Running volume includes mileage, training frequency, and intensity. This is exactly why I choose to program a deload week for most of my clients every 4 weeks. Choosing to continue to add running volume longer than 4 weeks, without programming a deload week, is taking on an unnecessary risk for the average runner.
However, for those that don’t follow established strength & conditioning guidelines, this is why I'll see an influx of runners become my patients during these particular periods of training cycles. There’s one group that shows up about 4-8 weeks after their training starts. So, for the Chevron Houston Marathon, that’s typically in October and early November for seasoned runners. The injury pops up in late August/early September, and then the runner typically has a period of resting and trying to run, sometimes through a few cycles, before ever getting the injury properly assessed.
The second group comes to me during the last 6 weeks of training – this is the one where higher mileage and harder workouts are pushing them over the edge into overtraining/injury territory.
The key takeaway to remember is that most injuries tend to show up in that 3–4 week window after the increase in running volume, as your body is working hard to adapt to the increased volume of training. This is why it is so important to program a deload week every 4-6 weeks in your training program, and to prioritize your recovery methods just as high as your training methods!
Because of this, I highly recommend getting ahead of things! July, August and September are good months to be proactive and figure out how to progress in a smart way and start incorporating whatever it is you are missing. (Ahem, strength training, anyone?)
