The long, mostly boring road of rehab

Injury recovery is happening, but it’s mostly too boring to talk about

As I mentioned on the podcast this week, I don’t get injured often but when I do, it’s an absolute doozy. And there is something particularly comical about this last round. Mainly because I had the original injury for all fo about a few days (mid-shin stress fracture) before I tripped into the door frame at home after yoga and broke my toe. Now the shin is fine, but the toe is definitely not. Injury recovery is hard time at the best of times, but I find this particular kind particularly annoying – mostly because it’s just waiting. Plenty of injuries you actually have to do things – strengthen things, improve core control, adjust imbalances. Last time, I had targets to hit as I went a long – once you hit this level of strength then we can look at running. I don’t have any targets beyond waiting for my toe to not hurt. Which is mostly frustrating and boring and eventually you accept that you probably have a 12 week injury, not a 6 week one. But on the upside the shin is fine. And as my running coach said, at least you injured both things at exactly the same time. Less waiting. Runner’s know. This week I’ve been taking a bit of a break from deep water running and walking instead, because sometimes you use all of your limited injury recovery energy on other things and you’ve just got to let yourself take the path of least resistance.

But if you are dealing with injury recovery, here are the things that are currently helping me:

First, I’m going to the gym more. I organised with them to increase my days because I know it’s significantly harder to do things on my own. And rehab usually involves a significant amount of alone time, and not fun alone time like with running, just boring alone time.
Second, I give myself a whole lot of grace for when I have trouble doing things that would normally come easy to me. Compassion goes a long way.
Third, I control what can be controlled. Which at the moment mostly involves making sure my toe is strapped, not doing anything stupid and upping my collagen and vitamin d intake.
And finally, keeping myself accountable so I don’t drift into doing nothing, no matter how tempting that would be. I’ll thank me when I can run again and I haven’t let all of my habits go south.

I’m writing a book about how to love running enough for it to change your life.

The book is going to focus on my journey so far, the when the why and the how of the workouts and of training, but also how it all connects to things that are far bigger than running. I’m taking up the challenge of writing a book in 30 days. Which is a lot of writing, but hopefully just enough pressure to keep the momentum going. You can sign up to read the daily words on patreon and get access to a whole range of bonus podcast episodes, and an ebook with 52 running workouts, so you’ll never be stuck for ideas ever again. Stay up to date on: