Inside Elite Training: Dealing with Setbacks

Finn Melanson [00:00:10]: Hello, fellow runners. I'm your host Finn Milanson, and this is the Run to the Top podcast, the podcast dedicated to making you a better runner with each and every episode, we are created and produced by the expert team of coaches at Runner Connect. Net, where you can find the best running information on the internet, as well as training plans to fit every runner and every budget. A few months ago, we shared a peek inside a Week of training of an elite Runner, our very own coach, Alex Ostberg. Based on your feedback, you really enjoyed seeing how an elite runner shares the same struggles, doubts and challenges you do, even though they are running paces and times that seem out of this world. Well, Coach Alex is back with another relatable glimpse inside a week of training of an elite runner. Alex is currently building back from a setback in his training, which I know many of us have also experienced. He'll share the mental and physical challenges of building back the mindset of shifting goals and races when things don't go as planned, and how he's building his training to come back stronger. This is a really great in depth look at the mindset and training of an elite runner in a situation all of us can understand and learn from. Let's take it away, Alex. If you're tired of sweaty, smelly and stained seats after your runs, then you have to check out the car seat covers made specifically for runners from dry seats. Head to Driseats.com to learn more and use code RC 20 to get 20%.

Alex Ostberg [00:01:42]: Off your first order.

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Alex Ostberg [00:02:09]: Hey, this is Alex. I'm back for another podcast. This week I wanted to talk specifically about a week of training that I had about two months ago, and the reason I chose this week was because I was returning from an injury and I thought that there are definitely some lessons I've learned over the years that I think are pretty generally applicable to this audience. Because as runners, whether we like it or not, we're always testing the limits of what we're capable of, and oftentimes that means we're all going to encounter injuries on the journey and we can do our best to avoid them, but they tend to pop up. And even if it's not a full blown injury, I think some of the same lessons apply to learning how to manage pain and also how to go about a training cycle in the healthiest way possible such that we can reach the starting line happy and healthy and ready to compete when it matters most. So before I launch into the week of training and share some details. I did just want to put a disclaimer that of course my circumstances are totally unique to my situation. But I do think that there are some universal elements of being injured that we all can relate to, and I think some lessons that are, like I said, generally applicable to the whole audience. So even if you haven't been injured before or you haven't had anything severe, it's just been some minor things over time, I still think there's some lessons that you could learn and some mindsets and some practical takeaways and tactics that you could consider from the experiences that I've gathered and we'll share today. So just to go into the week of training really quickly, I don't want to spend too much time going over the details of what I did because again, this is so individualized. But in early March of this year, I actually hurt my back on a training run. I was pretty overcooked in training. I was trying to prepare for a ten K in March and was really pushing my volume and pushing my intensity, and unfortunately I got hurt and my back started bothering me. And pretty much the first step in this process was to rest, as it is for most injuries, as runners. I know I'm talking to a subset of the population here, but we're a little bit masochistic in that we have a very high tolerance for pain and high tolerance for suffering. And many runners I've encountered actually come to enjoy that a little bit. And so it's actually one of the hardest things to do is to rest in the face of pain or discomfort because we've trained our bodies so well to try to endure that. But when this injury first popped up, the first thing that I did was rest. So I'm not going to go over the details of that because what that consisted of was mostly just me taking a couple of weeks off of training, just fully resetting, trying to focus on my sleep and my lifestyle habits to recover as fast as possible. And then that takes me to the week of March 27 to April 2, which was the week specifically I wanted to touch on for this podcast. So this was a point where I had gotten past the initial acute recovery phase of the injury and the pain was gone, moving around on a daily basis, and now I was returning back to ground running again. I am very lucky in that I live in Chapel Hill and I have access to some wonderful resources, so I was actually using an antigravity treadmill to help my return back into running. I actually did not get a formal diagnosis for this injury, but it was either a pretty bad strain, lower back strain, or it may have even been the beginnings of a stress reaction, either in my hip or my sacrum. So reducing the load and coming back on an alter g was a huge advantage that I had. So at the beginning of this week, I was starting to do 30 to 35 minutes sessions on the altar g treadmill at 85% body weight. I was coupling that with some cross training. So I was doing some alter G treadmill in the morning and then coming back in the afternoon for some swimming. And I was also adding in some biking. So what this looked like was monday I did 30 minutes at 85% body weight on the altar g. Tuesday, I did 35 minutes at 85% body weight on the altar g. That afternoon, I came back with a 30 minutes swim. Wednesday, I did a 40 minutes session on the altar g at 85% to 90% body weight. Thursday, I just completely unloaded and cross trained. I just went on the bike and did an 80 minutes bike ride. And Friday was my first ground run. So I started off with a 25 minutes run on the ground, and that was at a nice and easy pace. So at this point, I transitioned off of the altar g. Saturday, I took off, and then Sunday I did a 30 minutes run on the ground, again at a nice and easy pace. So right off the bat, many of you are going to be saying, okay, I don't have access to an altar g and I don't have as much time as you do to train. Totally fair points. And like I said, I wanted to really put a disclaimer here that these are my individual circumstances, but I really wanted to use this week as a launching pad to talk more about the mindset that I have around injury and some of the lessons that I've learned. Because I think those are the relatable aspects of this journey and things that, if you're a runner, you're bound to encounter at some point in the journey. So the first lesson I really wanted to talk about was acceptance and objectivity. As I mentioned earlier, we become so trained to endure discomfort and pain that oftentimes we try to keep pressing forward in the face of signals that are telling us it's probably not smart, too. And even when something's starting to hurt, the first reaction is, how can I apply more work to solve this problem? And unfortunately, more work tends to worsen the problem. It tends to exacerbate injuries and make them worse. So typically, the first step in any injury process is to actually give yourself permission to rest. And I say permission because it's so difficult to do. And if you value your journey and you value your own body and your own health and well being, you really do need to give yourself permission to rest. And if you can't do that yourself, I think this is where there's a huge benefit to working with a coach who can objectively evaluate a situation and tell you, listen, they can help hold up a meter and tell you listen. You've been running for seven days now. Your pain is getting worse by the day. When have you ever been in this situation where something has spontaneously resolved if it's been trending in the wrong direction and getting worse on a daily basis? Sometimes those brutally honest questions are all we need to ask ourselves. But again, the mindset that we've cultivated as runners is so counter to actually resting and doing less that it's hard to admit to ourselves that that's really the solution to a problem. So having a coach here in this situation is extremely helpful. The other thing that I encounter a lot is that people are terrified to deviate from a plan. We give training plans to our athletes at Runners Connect and they could stretch three, four months in the distance. But the reality is, even though that plan appears to be static and every runner has a plan that they're following, to some degree, plans should be dynamic. A plan is only as good as its ability to adapt to its circumstances. You can't be a slave to a program that was written three months ago when of course, there's going to be updated information, you're going to gain fitness, and you're going to encounter challenges along the way. So a lot of times I just hear people say, that's not what the plan says, or I've come this far, I've done this much work. I can't rest now. And that takes me to this other point, which is that people tend to make really irrational or illogical decisions around injuries. Whenever people say, I've come this far, I can't stop now, it reminds me of a concept that I learned in school. You can apply it to psychology and economics, which is the sunk cost fallacy, which is that as humans, we tend to make future decisions that are overly influenced by prior efforts that can't be refunded. So let's say you've put in three months of training into a block and you get to a point where you're now experiencing pain because of all the work that you've already put in, it makes it agonizing to stop. Whereas if you hadn't put in any work beforehand and you were a blank slate starting from scratch, you would have absolutely no problem resting. But again, those prior efforts we've made that can't be refunded, they actually make us a slave to our prior evaluations and prior decisions. Whereas the completely rational person would say, I'm in pain now, I'm going to ignore the sunk costs of the work that I've done, and I'm actually going to try to make a decision objectively with the information that I have, not efforts that I've made in the past that I can't get back. So what this really takes me to is you should view injuries and decisions in training not only as a backward facing problem, as in, look at everything that I've done. I can't stop now. But you also need to consider the future cost as well. So you need to look at this as a forward facing problem as well. And what I mean by that is instead of saying, oh, I've done all this training, I've done 50 miles, we it's the best training of my life. If I give up now or if I stop now or at all deviate from the plan, I'm going to lose all the progress that I made. We also need to consider, well, what is this going to look like if I keep going forward right now and I don't rest? And there's a very underappreciated cost that people don't consider to continuing to train on an injury. You could turn something that's fairly benign into something that's catastrophic by not viewing the forward facing problem instead of just looking backwards and thinking about all the effort that you can't get back again. So that's really I enjoy talking about this. I was a psychology minor in college, so thinking about the mindsets around injury to me are really interesting because we all tend to fall into these similar traps. So those are some of the points I wanted to address up front. When something starts hurting, when you're in the initial stages of an injury, what are the things that you need to think about? Now, I wanted to also talk about what are the considerations during a comeback when you're bridging the gap from pure rest to you're starting to load your musculoskeletal system again, you're starting to do harder training. What does that look like? And what are some considerations that you should keep in mind? And what did I learn and what did I kind of keep in mind this week that I shared? What were some of the details that were important? One of the things that I've learned is that discomfort is obviously very uncomfortable. Pain hurts. It should, but you should view it as a signal and not a panic button. I think a lot of times people, as soon as something hurts, they immediately start to panic and they freak out and they say, oh no, something's gone wrong. And the reality is, yeah, that's not a good sign. It's objectively something that's going to be difficult to manage. But instead of panicking, we should say, okay, you know what, this is my body giving me a signal. This is my body telling me something. The reality is that we all have a certain capacity for load, we have a certain capacity for training. And if you're going to be pushing the envelope a little bit and trying to improve as a runner, which I'd imagine most people listening to this podcast are you're going to be dancing on that razor's edge, right? And you need to kind of be able to manage some of these decisions and manage some of the discomfort that inevitably comes with that. So what I would say here is when you're returning from an injury, you should view it a little bit as an experiment, and I know that may sound like a strange concept, so let me elaborate a little bit further. When I was coming back from this back injury, instead of viewing discomfort as something that meant that I automatically failed my return to running protocol, instead, I viewed discomfort as a signal, like I said. So if I was doing a run this week and my back started to bother me, I said, okay, you know what? Maybe I actually just barely crossed over my upper limit on my capacity for handling load. But that doesn't mean I've erased all the progress that I've made over the past few weeks and months. Rather, it just means that I just went over that line a little bit. And I need to correct. I need to course correct.

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Alex Ostberg [00:17:35]: So I think the big thing here is that we don't want to jump to conclusions prematurely, right? And we need to take all the data that we get in our training in context. One of the biggest things that I try to tell people when they're returning from injury is you never want to actually look at one isolated data point and draw conclusions off of that, right? So when you're coming back and my back was a little bit sore after a run, again, that's a signal, right? That's a data point. But that's only useful in the context of your return to running. So you need to evaluate a trend rather than an isolated data point. If something is sore but it's getting less sore on subsequent runs, well, that's actually probably a good thing. So in that case, discomfort is actually a signal that's telling you, you know what? My body is adapting. I'm able to handle more and more without pushing myself to the same point of pain every time. So the other thing I wanted to talk about, too, and I think this has been a comforting lesson that I've learned in training, and especially when it comes to recovering from an injury, is that load is necessary to improve. And I'll explain what I mean by that. When I was a younger runner, I tended to think that when I was injured and I was coming back, I needed to just basically go on bed rest for two to three weeks and do absolutely nothing. But as I learned a little bit more about biology and physiology, you learn that the body actually adapts to load. It actually makes itself stronger through load. So, of course, in the initial phases, when something's really, really hurting, you're better off resting, because the body has put itself in this state of acute breakdown relative to buildup. But once you put some rest in the bank and you're building back again, and you're doing so in a deliberate and calculated way, load is actually your friend. Bones actually grow stronger with loading patterns than they do if you were just a sedentary person, right? Gymnasts, for instance, they're making themselves, they're imposing these jarring loads on their skeleton on a daily basis. If they get the dosing correct, they actually have the strongest bones of any athlete because of these high impact forces that they take on on a daily basis. Runners generally have a higher bone density than cyclists because we actually have pounding in our sport. And of course, too much of that can be bad, but the optimal dose of anything, right, if you hit that Goldilock zone, that actually can make your bone stronger. The same thing goes for an Achilles injury. Again, a lot of people think that they should just go on bed rest and kick their feet up and wait three weeks and just hope that the body spontaneously heals itself. And it probably will to some degree. But in my experience, at least, these Achilles injuries actually tend to heal a little bit better with a loading protocol. And if you work with a physical therapist, you'll learn about eccentric loading protocols where you do calf raises and slow eccentric heel raises and dips. And these are ways to load that Achilles such that it would be stronger than if it didn't otherwise get load. So this is one of just the principles of the body when it comes to biology, is that in order to return, you can't go from zero to 100. When you're returning from an injury, you can't just ramp up so quickly. And I also think that the 10% rule is not always the best. That's the theory that you want to go 10% in your weekly mileage, like so from 30 to 33 to 36, 37 miles on a weekly basis. I think that's very, very individual and context dependent for the person. Instead, I think we should again view a return to injury as an experiment and say, okay, if I actually am trending in the wrong direction, then I need to course correct. But if I'm not feeling pain and I'm feeling better and better on a daily basis, then I can continue to ramp up again, just using those signals, using those data points. The takeaway here is that don't be afraid to load the body. You need to actually put strain and stress through the structures in the body for them to adapt. And sometimes that's a little bit uncomfortable. I mean, doing heel calf raises with an Achilles injury can be a little bit uncomfortable, but that load is going to be very therapeutic overall. So again, I don't want to give specific injury advice for the person, but I'm just saying overall bed rest is probably a more guaranteed way to have muscle atrophy than it is to heal something. Of course, once you're out of the initial phases of an injury. The other thing that I wanted to touch on was that when you're returning from an injury, and again, a coach can be really helpful with this, it's that you want to space out your return to running such that you have a clear signal before proceeding with the next step. So in my week of training, as you noticed, what I was doing was I was applying load and then I was backing off for a period of 24 to 48 hours, right? So I did those two runs on Monday, Tuesday, and then Wednesday I actually took completely off, or I went on the bike instead, actually. And then right after I did my first ground run that Friday, I took Saturday completely off before running again on Sunday. And the reason why is because a lot of times the pain signals in our body can be a little bit delayed. Everyone here, or many people here may have heard of this idea of delayed onset muscle soreness. And I think if you try and take on too many things all at once and you overwhelm the body, you may get a very strong signal, but you don't want that signal to come a day later when you've already done like two more workouts. Rather, you want to space out your return such that you do a run, you apply stress to the body, and then you give it a period of time to see how it responds before then evaluating what you're going to do again. So I tend not to make plans more than, like, five to seven days into the future when I'm returning from an injury, because the trajectory and how much I can ramp up my training is so subject to how I'm feeling and what the signals are in my body, that I want to make the plan dynamic enough that I can accommodate the signals I'm getting, rather than being stuck to a static plan that just can't possibly change. The other thing I wanted to say, too, and this is kind of something I learned in science class back in the day, was that when you're testing something, you want to be able to isolate a variable such that you can understand the true effect of what that stress means in the context of the body. So let me elaborate on that a little bit here. So if you are coming back from an injury and you're deciding to try to just throw the kitchen sink at your injury, so to speak, right? Like, you're going to try and do PT, you're going to try and cross train, you're going to try to do antigravity treadmills or Aqua jogging. If you start throwing so many different things at your injury, it's it's hard to actually isolate the impact of any one given intervention, right? So, for instance, when I was coming back, I tend to just do like one thing at a time. I only change one variable at a time. So when I'm progressing in a return to running protocol, as you notice, on Monday to Tuesday, I just did, I think it was like 30 minutes at 85% body weight to then 35 minutes at 85% body weight. I wasn't going to try and change. So all I did there was I changed the overall duration of the run. I didn't want to change the intensity. I didn't end the body weight and throw more cross training on top of that because then I wouldn't be able to tell if I felt no pain, then that means that that intervention worked. That means that I was able to handle five more minutes without taking a step back. But if I did that and then I did like 90 minutes of cross training that same afternoon and then also went to PT and I was sore the next day, well, then it's hard to tell. Is this from the PT? Is this from the cross training? Is this from the running? So the, the lesson here is that, you know, when you're returning from something, change one variable at a time and tweak them slowly before you make big changes, right? Increase the duration of a run by five minutes before you're going to start doubling your session from 30 to 60 minutes, right? There's a time and a place where you can probably make that exponential return to running, where that growth is maybe going from like 30 miles to 40 miles to 60 miles if you're someone who regularly does 70 miles per week, let's say. But you always want to make small changes before you make big changes. The last thing I wanted to say was kind of my wrap up points here is that I think returning from an injury can be very difficult, but we also forget that it can be fun because you make gains very, very quickly. And I think there's no better feeling to the human mind than progress. Progress is extremely gratifying. It's really satisfying to feel, and you actually feel like you can build momentum from a week to week basis. So when you're in the middle of a hard training cycle and you're doing marathon training, you're kind of operating on the flat of the curve, so to speak, right? You're getting diminishing returns. Like, the more you run, you're not necessarily getting it's obviously extremely beneficial. And you're building up durability. You're building up a tolerance for discomfort, you're building up endurance, but you don't necessarily see the same rapid gains that you do when you're coming back. So just remember that building momentum is extremely fun. And although there's discouraging points along the journey, of course, anytime you're coming back from something challenging, that's difficult. But it's also the point in training where you tend to make the most rapid gains. And I think harnessing that momentum can be really fun and really encouraging along the way. Two kind of miscellaneous points that I also wanted to mention here. These are kind of rules of thumb that I keep in mind. So if you've made it this far into the podcast, hopefully I can leave you with two more very actionable items. Whenever I'm dealing with some kind of pain and faced with the decision of, okay, do I need to actually change my training because of this? Do I need to actually rest? I always tell myself that three days is better than three weeks. And that's kind of this mantra that I've developed in my own mind, which is that if you take. 72 hours off. And let's say you've felt pain for one or two days, you're really not going to lose much fitness at all if you're already someone who's, who's pretty fit and healthy. In fact, in 72 hours, based on my understanding of biology, you might actually super compensate a little bit. You might actually adapt to your training just by giving yourself a little bit of rest and backing off for about 72 hours. And maybe those three days are going to give you a very clear signal and tell you, okay, yes, that pain resolved, that discomfort resolved. Now I can get back into it or after 72 hours if it's bad, right, if it's still hurting, that's a pretty clear signal that you might have something a little bit more serious on your hands and you should probably take a step back and go see a PT or go see a doctor to get this evaluated. But if I don't take those three days so often, this very quickly turns into a three week ordeal or more. Most running injuries are repetitive stress injuries. So we typically get signals and our body gives us warning signs that we're all too good at ignoring. And if we can become more attuned to what these signals mean and kind of making micro adjustments from these signals rather than, again, rather than panicking, or rather than refusing to adapt our schedule in the face of signals that we're getting, that can very often mean you just take three days off for something rather than three weeks. And the most successful people that I know in this sport are the ones who don't let their ego get in the way. They're able to swallow their pride and say, you know what, I need to rest here. Hard work is not going to solve this problem. And they're the ones, the ones who have the courage to rest are the ones who are able to have, and from my experience, have the most sustainable careers because they tend to make better decisions in these situations. The last piece of advice that I got, and this is always going to stick with me, it's incredibly simple, but I think fairly overlooked. And it's that if you feel pain when you're walking around, you're almost certainly going to feel pain when you're running. And so I learned this lesson because early on when I was in high school, let's say I had something that was bothering me and I was walking around during the school day, and I had practiced that afternoon and I was like, oh, this thing is really hurting me, walking around just like going from class to class. But I said, oh, once I start running, then this pain will resolve, it'll warm up. And maybe that happens in like 5% of cases, but the reality is that when you're walking around, you're just applying regular stress to your musculoskeletal system. Running puts like at least three times that load through the same structures. So if something hurts when it's walking, when you're walking, it's almost always going to hurt when you're running. So use that as a good rule of thumb to say, okay, something's still hurting me when I'm walking around. I'm probably not ready to progress to running yet. And that's like, I think, a really good rule of thumb to prevent you from prematurely making decisions that would jeopardize your return to running and that would otherwise make you come back too soon. So I know that this episode was pretty jam packed with a lot of information. I hope this wasn't too individual to my own circumstances, but rather gave everyone kind of a peek inside my own mentality. And some of the strategies that I use to kind of talk myself through these injuries and some of the tactics that I've used and some of the mental models I've used to try to avoid making bad decisions time and time again. I certainly have had my fair share of injuries. I know most runners who've been around for a while have as well, but I think responding to these things, it's a learned trait. We can get better at it. We can become more finely attuned to what our body is telling us and then respond more appropriately when it comes around. So that was a week in my training. That was my approach to dealing with the acute phase of injury, the comeback phase, and then the return to competitive pursuits. So I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out. I'd be happy to chat in more details. Thank you.

Finn Melanson [00:32:14]: Thanks for listening to the Run to the Top podcast. I'm your host, Finn Mulanson. As always, our mission here is to help you become a better runner with every episode. Please consider connecting with me on Instagram at Wasatch, finn and the rest of our team at Runners Connect. Also consider supporting our show for free with a rating on the Spotify and Apple podcast players. Lastly, if you love the show and want bonus content, behind the scenes experiences with our guests, and premier access to contests and giveaways, then subscribe to our newsletter by going to RunnersConnect. Net podcast. Until next time, happy trading.