The Injury: Part 1

The beginning

Halfway through a dreary January with my house in the midst of a renovation, I finally started feeling as though my training was going well. After several weeks of harder, faster track workouts, I was gaining confidence in my ability to race again. The fall had not gone particularly well (as far as racing went) and I was looking forward to indoor track and being competitive again.

In addition to weekly intervals at Reggie, I had been running hills every week since the beginning of December. I had started with long slow hills, but after a few weeks had started running shorter, steeper hills. The previous Saturday I had done a particularly hard workout on Highland Street -- from the base of the hill at Lowell all the way to Forest Street. This was the kind of workout I knew I needed: mentally and physically challenging and oriented toward power.

The following Tuesday, I headed to the indoor track intending to do something short and fast -- a mix of 400s and 200s. I would be racing in a week and half, and wanted to run 1M race pace or better for a bit. I didn't want to trash my legs, but definitely wanted to see how they would feel with the quicker turnover.

While warming up with flexibility drills, I felt a tweak in my upper right leg, an indistinct discomfort somewhere in the hamstring/hip/glute area. I didn't worry about it until I started my strides. There was an unusual amount of tightness... or was it weakness... as I brought the foot down to contact the track. I got through my strides, and decided to run a 200 at 90% to test everything out. I was able to run it in about 34 seconds and while I was running the discomfort stayed exactly the same. After finishing, it was a different story, as the discomfort grew into a steady ache.

The first rule of injuries

The first rule of injuries is that they make you stupid. And in most cases, it isn't the initial injury that does you in, it's the stupidity of the actions you take afterwards.

In my case, I began to act stupidly almost immediately. There I was at the track all warmed up and ready for my workout, and I was feeling resentful that some minor tweak was going to deprive me of this one hour of the week that was truly mine. I decided that I would tough it out and try to get in my workout, despite the obvious pain that I still couldn't identify. I took some time to stretch my hamstrings (they were feeling tight and balky) and then got back on the track and continued running 200s.

Every interval followed the same pattern. Initial discomfort with the first few steps, then the discomfort would recede as I reached full stride. I would feel "ok" through the interval, although I felt as though my form was breaking down more than it should for so early in the workout, and then I would finish and the steady ache. I ran six 200s this way. On the last one, my form starting coming apart completely on the home stretch, and I finally got the message and stopped my workout.

The second rule of injuries

The second rule of injuries is that once you have admitted that you are injured, you almost always misidentify the injury itself, its cause, or both. You then proceed to try a random series of strategies to fix the problem, without fully understanding its underlying nature.

In my case, I assumed that I had strained my hamstring. It was a funny kind of strain, though, because I didn't feel ANYTHING when I wasn't running, but as soon as I started, I felt like I had never run before. I felt clumsy and awkward, like I was swinging my legs mechanically rather than loping smoothly. I had taken a couple of days off immediately following the ill-fated track workout, and then started running easily again, but those four mile runs were surprisingly hard. I would come back home and Ann would ask, "How was your run?" and I would answer that if running was always like this, well I wouldn't be a runner.

But my injury had made me stupid and stubborn. I had put in a lot of work to get in shape, and I wasn't going to let it all slip away. I started scheming how to "train through" my recovery. Surely with a little bit more stretching, longer warmups, and a break from the track, I was sure I would recover quickly. Well, and if not, I could always run through a little discomfort until it went away on its own.