Running Injuries That Aren't Running Injuries

I guarantee you that the most frustrating thing for any athlete or any coach is the injury suffered not in training, but in day-to-day existing.

As a coach, I dreaded interactions like these:

"Coach... my knee is really sore today. What should I do?"

"I don't know. When did you first notice the pain?"

"Right before practice, after I banged my knee on the bleachers wrestling with Joey."

Every coach out there has had a conversation like this, and it's just so frustrating. You try to use such good judgment in balancing hard training days with recovery days. You monitor overall mileage, speed work, weight room work by the week, by the month, by the season, by the year. You watch over your athletes like my grandmother used to watch over her vegetable garden, tending the young tomato plants and talking to the green peppers...

But life goes on out there, and athletes do stuff... regular stuff, like wrestle with their friends, skateboard, shoot hoops, go skiing, dare each other to jump over trash cans...or just walk calmly across the living room carpet... and they get hurt.

Somehow, it just doesn't seem fair. If you engage in a physically demanding activity like track and field, at least your injuries should bear some relationship to that activity. It's more honorable to be wounded in battle. But many wounds are inflicted by just going about your business.

I was thinking about this the other day as I considered the fact that Dan just broke his collar bone (downhill skiing), Tyler hurt his calf (xc skiing), David hurt his toe (snow-shoeing?), and Anna stepped on a toothpick. Meanwhile, one friend pulled a rib muscle shoveling snow, another banged his knee after slipping on the ice, and a third smashed his toe into a table leg.

Back in the day, Ankit got a splinter in his knee while riding his bike, Clay ruptured his spleen playing whiffle ball, David banged his knee while bouncing a volleyball on his head, and Sam ran into a fire hydrant while on a training run.

After a while you wonder if the safest place to be is to be churning out the intervals on an indoor track, and taking a chance with the shin splints.

But what are you going to do? You can't live life wrapped in cotton wool, as Bannister famously remarked.

(Speaking of Bannister, John Landy stepped on a flash bulb and cut his foot a couple of days before his "Mile of the Century" with Bannister. He ran anyway... and broke four minutes. I guess the lesson is to deal with what happens to you, even if it seems like God is playing a practical joke at your expense.)

Watch Bannister (who caught a cold) race Landy (who cut his foot):

Vancouver - "Mile of the Century"

In these winter months when hazards are everywhere, just be careful out there... ok? Just be careful.