Injury strikes again

Summer training was going well; I was near a personal best for my 5k time at the Serpentine end of the month race and got a personal best at the Regent's Park 10k race in August.

Unfortunately injury subsequently struck a few days after the 10k race. After speaking with my physio I seem to have acquired IT band syndrome on my right knee, which was incredibly frustrating as I felt great about my running at the time. I don't think it is as bad as the calf injury I got at the beginning of 2016; partly because I can still walk without pain and also because I managed to recognise that I needed to step back from running as soon as I started to feel the pain. This was something I didn't do when I injured my calf.

I have also been quite lucky in that after an initial period of rest, that I have been able to move to 'active rest' by cycling. I am hopefully going to be able to turn this into running every other day. Two of the most important things I have learnt from getting an injury- can you call ITB syndrome an injury?-  is to be patient and persistent. By this I mean recognising that an issue will take some time to heal, whilst also maintaining the hope that I will be back to fitness in the relatively near future. The persistence part can also be applied to the various as well as 'interesting' exercises that you have to do during rehabilitation.

I suppose the most annoying part of this injury was that I was getting into some decent running form, which had taken a few months to build up to. It has meant pulling out of running the Ladywell 10k and the Cardiff Half Marathon. I wasn't too annoyed about missing Cardiff, as I have been trying not to put too much pressure on myself for big races, and I still think it is achievable to get a personal best at another half marathon. I was unhappy about Ladywell because I think a track 10k would have helped for my cross country racing in terms of toughening up mentally, there was a chance of a personal best and I have never run 25 laps round a track continuously. Ultimately there will be other track 10ks that I can do, and what is more important two races or being able to run properly again?

Whilst wallowing in my frustration about not being able to run, I came across an article a running friend of mine shared about anticipating injuries and what he learnt from a stress fracture . Of course my injury wasn't as bad as a stress fracture, but there are many useful lessons that the author drew from his experience that I have listed below:

• Injury came about from not recognising that his life circumstances had changed- his wife had had a baby- whilst continuing the same training routine.

• Consequently his sleep/ recovery had been reduced to four hours a night. This he believes made his bones weaker.

• Also he had stopped doing his normal maintenance/ strength workouts, instead favouring more running.

•  Key problems in not recognising the injury were: that there was nothing drastically different in the way he was increasing his training- only going up by the usual 10% increase, the injury crept up relatively quickly and there was no one else to offer advice on how his plan could be adjusted.

• A minimum of six hours sleep is needed to avoid inury.

For now I will continue with my various rehabilitation exercises, which I have listed below:

•Single leg glute bridges.

•Bodyweight squats (progressing to weighted squats, once my knee has recovered).

•Single legs squats.

•Holding the squat position against a wall for more than 60secs with a yoga block between my knees.

What these exercises have shown me is how weak particular parts of my quads are and how they needed to be strengthened; which big composite movements like squats and deadlifts weren't targeting.

After getting my  second injury I am starting to come to the conclusion that it is very difficult to avoid getting injured, as there are a whole range of factors that contribute to the incident. Reading the stress fracture article made me realise that it can be easy to blame oneself for an injury, whereas things can just take us by surprise. We are responsible for how we train, but maybe not so much for the external factors that impact our training. It is to this end, that I am coming to accept that at some point I may get injured again and that this is part of the 'rough and tumble' of being a runner. The main thing I am definitely going to keep under review is my sleep and set a baseline of six to seven hours, though that is easier said than done.

In the meantime here is a completely unrelated and entirely inaccurate attempt of me trying to do my rehab exercises: