How to put an injury to good use

Life isunpredictable and accidents happen. “Shit happens,” we usually say, and no one is immune. But as the Stoics already said 2300 years ago, it only matters how you react to what happens to you. Your power is to act on the things you can change, not the things that are beyond your control. It depends on you only what depends on you: you cannot choose what happens to you but only how you react to what happens to you.

A great philosophical turn of phrase to say that an unforeseen injury has come along to alter your plans: it may have only slowed them down, perhaps changed them slightly, or it may have turned them upside down, cancelled them, annihilated them. Have we prepared a dramatic enough scene? Now let’s see how you can respond, because it’s all there, it will have been understood. And the good news is that out of something negative can come something positive. The purpose of these tips is to get something useful out of stopping your sports activity, or at least your main one, which is running. Because you can come out better, all right.

1. Playing alternative, low-impact sports

Stopping running due to injury doesn’t mean stuffing yourself on the couch trying to watch the entire Netflix catalog (that’s impossible, and then there’s Prime Video and Apple TV and Disney+ and who knows how many others). There are many other activities you can do, especially those that are low-impact and put relatively little load on your body. It is superfluous to specify that you can practice them only if the injury is not serious and disabling: a fractured pelvis does not allow you to do anything, can we agree on that? Compatibly with your injury, you may decide to bike or swim-these are activities that unload your legs and your whole body of a lot of weight, respectively, while still allowing you to move.

The purpose is not only to move but more importantly to fortify muscle groups that running alone neglects, such as the core or upper body. This is functional training to develop body parts that are needed in running and that will help you when you resume running, compensating for weakness in the legs.

2. Understanding the causes

Excluding the possibility that the injury is accidental (you were hit by a car coming out of a parking lot and its driver did not see you), it is important to understand the causes that may have caused it. A wrong stroke setting? Do you know, for example, whether you run heel or forefoot? Have you ever done a gait analysis? Have you recently changed shoes and suspect that it may depend on them? In this case, it is very useful to have a diary that allows you to consult a history of your workouts over a sufficiently long period: has this happened to you before? In what condition? Was it a particularly stressful time when maybe you were getting little sleep? And what does your food diary say? Did you have a particularly unbalanced diet perhaps too low in salts, fiber, and protein? All these details can help you reconstruct the conditions that have already caused injury in the past to avoid them in the future.

3. Maintain contact with fellow runners.

Being forced not to run due to force majeure can lead to a psychological rejection of anything that reminds you of running. It is natural but it would be best to avoid it, also because the company you run with-if you have one-is a motivating factor in getting back into it. After all, you didn’t stop running, you just suspended activity while waiting to get back into shape. Therefore, continue to hear from them and plan to return to the road. In short, maintain a form of involvement that always fuels the desire to run.

4. Prepare the return

About your return: you cannot run now but it is only a temporary condition. Nothing prohibits you from planning for the future, for example, by signing up for a race. It’s important to have goals, and the one to resume running for some may be a bit too general: better to have something to pin on the calendar, such as a race. Maybe not challenging and realistic, like a 10k to assess physical status after a few months of resuming training. And from that start again to build a better fitness than you were in when the injury happened.

5. Shopping

In the end, the trick is to create motivating factors. A nice new notebook can be an irresistible invitation to write the journal you’ve been proposing to keep for years, and buying a new running outfit or replacing the shoes that remind you of your injury (and that may have been too old and contributed to your poor running) are an effective way to set another date on the calendar: the day you can finally use them.

As you may have guessed, the key is to put incidents to good use, placing them in a logical development: why did they happen? How can you avoid them in the future? Memory (journaling), awareness (understanding how you run and where you go wrong) and planning (schedules, contacts with running friends) help you do this.

As always in life, things happen regardless of your will but it is your responsibility to place them in a larger context and figure out what you can do with them. Because it is not necessarily the case that de-motivation and failure come from an injury; on the contrary.