How Do I Adjust My Running Plan After An Injury?

Audio Transcript

Coach Jeff: In today’s episode, we’re going to take a question from Keith. Keith asks, “Hello coaches. After my last long run two weeks ago, I developed some pain in the latter edge of my right foot. It hurt when I walked, so I decided to rest. After about ten days, the pain cleared and I’ve tested my foot and it seems fine. I have a half marathon at the end of the month and I’d like to resume my training. Should I start where my plan says I should or does my schedule need to be adjusted so I start where I would be if I hadn’t missed the ten days?”

Keith, that’s a great question. Before I answer it, I just want to go a little bit into details about this daily podcast and the types of questions that we’re going to go into. What we’re not going to do in the daily podcast is try to answer or diagnose your running injuries. The reason for that is, it’s extremely difficult to do that via a small paragraph of information or voicemail. It’s really difficult to do that without knowing a lot more about you, how things are feeling, and a little bit of back and forth.

It also seems very specific, since unless somebody has an injury, it’s not going to benefit them a lot. However, I took this question because obviously Keith isn’t asking about a specific injury. He’s asking, how do I resume my training, and that’s something that is extremely common and I think almost everybody that has an injury goes through. What do you do after a three-day rest, ten-day rest, fourteen-day rest? How do you get back in your training? How do you adjust appropriately?

Obviously, that’s going to be extremely individual to what your fitness level is, what your race distance is, how experienced you are, et cetera. However, I do think there are some general rules that you can follow and that’s how I’m going to go over them. The first thing I look at when we’re trying to adjust somebody’s schedule after missing time from an injury is, where are they in the training cycle.

In the training cycle, we can talk about what I call race specific training, which is roughly the eight or twelve weeks leading up to your goal race. That’s where ideally your training’s going to be the most race specific. Ideally what happens is that workouts build on each other. For example, maybe six weeks out from your race and you’re doing a 5K, you may have something like six times 400M at race pace, with a certain amount of rest. Then the rest week you may have something like, five times 600 and then the following week something like, four to five times 800. You can see that the total amount of time that you’d spent running at 5K paces increases every week; that’s a progression.

Then you have the training that’s outside race specific training, so that might be when you are maybe 16 weeks out from your race or a couple of months out from your race, you don’t have anything going on. That training usually isn’t very specific to the race. You’re not doing typically 5K specific intervals. You’re not necessarily progressing in that manner. They’re a little bit different.

My suggestion for people is, and this is just a generalization. If you’re in the race specific segment, so if you’re within six to ten weeks of your training plan, ideally what you should do is transition to what you should have been doing, because it’s building a progression and you don’t want to miss the progression. Let’s say you were eight weeks out when you got hurt and you missed ten days, then you would start back at your eight weeks. Basically you would adjust the schedule back, an entire ten days and then obviously you’re just going to skip that last ten days before the tapper.

I hope that makes a little bit of sense in terms of how this training planning would be structured. If you’re eight weeks out and let’s say you just missed two weeks that puts you at week six. You would start back at week eight and then you would basically eliminate the last two weeks outside of the tapper, obviously because the tapper has its own little week or two weeks specific segment. Now, if you’re outside the race specific sequence, then I recommend just going and skipping what you missed over, since there’s no progression that you’re building on necessarily.

Let’s say you’re twenty weeks out from a race and you missed two weeks, then you would start at what your training plan would have you be doing for week eighteen, because there you’re typically working on strengths or weaknesses, you’re working on things outside of the race specific segment, and not building a specific progression towards a race, so you’re not going to miss necessarily important sequence in the training cycle.

Now, obviously that’s just a general recommendation. I would say if you miss more than 14 days, you’re probably going to need a complete readjustment of your training schedule. What we found is, and this is based on my experience, but also a lot of the research that we looked at. We’ve looked at research on how fast you lose running fitness after a certain period of time, so how fast does your [veotemax 00:05:38] decrease, how fast is your muscular system decrease, et cetera. We looked at those factors and here’s our own personal experience. I found that if you miss anywhere from three to six days, really don’t lose much fitness at all.

I totally understand that it feels that way, trust me, after six days of not running, you feel like a sloth and you just feel so out of shape, but that’s not the case. Usually what you’re feeling there is actually your neuromuscular systems. The neuromuscular system degrades extremely quickly. The neuromuscular system is basically the mind muscle connection, so how fast your brain can transmit to your muscles the actions that it wants it to perform.

That deteriorates very quickly, but it also gains fitness or gets back to level very quickly. That’s why you’ll find that if you take five or six days off, the first few days feel really bad. You feel out of shape and then usually maybe two, three days later or light workout later, things start to click again. That’s because the neuromuscular system gets back up to speed, the fitness that you thought you lost wasn’t actually gone, and then you’re right back to where you were.

Then I find the period between six to twelve days, you will lose a little bit of fitness. You’ll obviously want to adjust a little bit for that in your training and progressing and getting back into your actual training plan. How much you lose is very dependent on, if you were able to do cross training while you were injured, how fit you were before you were injured, your experience level. If you have somebody who’s extremely experienced, you’ll still lose the same amount of fitness, but you are able to gain it back quicker because there’s a saying, and it applies to almost everybody that, getting back to a place is much easier than getting there the first time. The more times you’ve been at a high fitness level, so the higher your experience level, the easier it is to get back there.

Lastly, once you get over 12 days of missed time, you’re going to start to see some significant decreases in your fitness. Again, that’s where you’re going to want to consult with a coach or somebody who can look at your specific plan, look at your specific situation, and give you a recommendation for what you should do. This is getting a little long, but the one thing that I also want to say is, what I find happens to a lot of runners is, when they get injured like this, this is how it starts the injury cycle. You have a marathon or half marathon coming up at the end of the month. You get hurt, and you miss 12 days, and then you immediately jump back into training and sometimes you do even a little bit more because you feel like you’re out of shape and you need to make up for the time that you lost, but what ends up happening is, you’ve really set yourself up for injury there because you’re going above and beyond what you’re maybe ready for.

You’re above and beyond what your current fitness level is and you may even be trying to push that beyond what you normally would. Sometimes what happens is, you sacrifice months and months down the road of being injured or getting a long term injury like a plantar fasciitis or a recurring injury like an IT Band, something that keeps nagging, just to run that race three weeks from now. What I always try to tell runners is that, the next race that’s on your go list or upcoming, is not the end of your training. You can run for years and years and years and you have to remember that there’s always another race, there’s always another opportunity. Don’t sacrifice your really long-term goals, just to hit a race down the road.

What you should be doing is looking at it and saying, I’m going to get to my best fitness level and then I’m going to run the race as best as I can. When I say that I mean, focus your training on what you need to do to make sure that you stay injury free and that you progress at a fitness level that makes sense for where you’re at. Not, I need to be in sub-two-hour half marathon shape. I need to push it, push it, push it. Just do the workouts that you need to be doing to make progress from where you are at.

If you get to that sub-two, that’s great, if you’re at 2/10, yeah, I know you didn’t accomplish your goal, but if you stay injury free, then you’re going to set yourself up to be a sub-two at your next half marathon. Rather than trying to get sub-two, getting hurt, and then being injured for a month and a half, and then not being able to do it at your next race, and then pushing and pushing and pushing. That’s how the injury cycle works and people get into a really bad rut. I hope that answers your question and went into a little bit of detail about how you can adjust your own training.

I want to thank you guys for listening. If you want to ask your own question, all you need to do is visit runnersconnect.net/daily and then there’ll be a couple of record buttons on there. All you need to do is click the button and you can leave us a voicemail and we will answer your question on air. If you have a question for a specific coach, you can always request it in that voicemail. When you go to that runnersconnect.net/daily, you’ll see all of our coaches listed as well, so you can get a little background about who we are.

I’m going to be doing all the episodes for the next week or the first week or two of this podcast, but then we’ll be rotating in our coaches. Each coach will answer a set of questions each week. You’ll be hearing from all of us on the team and I hope you enjoy it. If you did enjoy today’s episode and you haven’t already, consider heading over to iTunes or your favorite podcast directory and subscribing and leaving a review. It would really help us reach more runners like you. Thanks so much for listening to our Extra Kick Podcast. Have a great run today.