Okay so you're a new triathlete or runner and you say you want my advice about that little ache and pain you're having?
After 2 1/2 years of doing triathlons, and after suffering through several injuries, and after doing extensive research after each of those injuries, I feel like I might have reached a basic understanding of how things work when it comes endurance/overuse injuries, which are a huge issue for everyone who does this. That understanding goes like this:
Basically, because you haven't run much before now, your muscles and tendons and ligaments and bones are not quite strong enough for running. When you work out, you will strain each of those, and they will break down a little bit microscopically, and then rebuild themselves, stronger than before. You feel that in your muscles most of all, especially at the beginning; when you work them very hard, they are pleasantly sore the next day. That is because your muscle fibers have undergone microscopic tears due to the strain you placed on them. After a few days those tears repair themselves and your muscles feel better and presto! they are now stronger.
But the key is that the same thing happens with your tendons and ligaments and even your bones. And the hard truth is that the rebuilding process is a LOT slower for tendons and ligaments and bones. In fact, I see all kinds of figures but the healing cycle for tendons seems to be something like 6-12 weeks, and for bones, at least as long.
If I am right that means the first time you take a run longer than you are accustomed to, even a short one, you are stressing your muscles, tendons and bones, and the tendons and bones thereafter begin a weeks-long process of rebuilding. During those weeks, however, you, as an excited new triathlete or runner, are doing more runs, adding more damage to the repair pipeline.
As often as not, you can sprint ahead quite a while before any of this catches up to you. You can probably work up to considerable distances, a full marathon even, but by then you will be living deep in a "healing deficit." After you finish the race, if you're not injured during it, you probably cut back sharply on your running. Then you try to run another, and perhaps it all catches up with you at that point if it hasn't yet.
The way I think about it, that all looks something like this:
In this picture, the gap between the blue and red lines would be your "healing deficit" and the peak of the blue graph might be the point you
realize you're "injured" and then are forced to rest, at which point
the healing finally catches up to the damage and you become strong
enough to consistently perform at that new level where the two lines
meet.
A few people work their way up, either without injury through luck or through persistence, to the point where they can consistently run marathons or whatever other distance makes them happy, without a healing deficit. But I bet most people overdo it on the way up – and of course since our tissue strength is constantly sinking without constant renewal, we have to work our way up repeatedly, like after every break from training. The longer you hold a high level of training, probably the higher your tolerance for lapses in training is.
So the bottom line is that you really have to increase your activity level very, very gradually (probably a lot more gradually than the 10% increase in mileage per week that is the standard recommended cap). Like everything, just how gradually probably depends on a million factors, such as your inborn genetic strength and speed of healing, your athletic history, your form and how much strain it imposes on your tissues, etc.
In fact the process of building strength is somewhat of a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, if you overdo it, you will get injured. On the other hand, if you don't train enough, you will grow weak – and then once again get injured. With all our tissues, it's use it or lose it. Take our bones, for example. Interestingly, they are not dead mineral with a living marrow, as I always kind of imagined,
but are "dynamic biological tissue." They are constantly being reabsorbed or eaten away by
our body, and only the constant stresses gravity and normal living
places on the bones, with the resultant stress-and-rebuilding process,
prevent them from being eroded into nothing. Astronauts in zero gravity
lose a lot of bone; studies have found highly variable levels of bone
loss, but one Soyuz 9 astronaut was found to experience an 8-10%
decrease in bone density
after just 18 days in space. Overall, the rate of erosion in zero-G is
estimated
to be about 1-2% per month. Use it or lose it. Runner's bones are stronger than other people's – but the process of getting them that way (and the accompanying tendons and ligaments) involves stressing them and runs the constant risk of overdoing it. Bone scans of athletes suspected of stress fractures often show damage to bones all over the place where no symptoms are felt.
There is no silver bullet to overcome this problem. Some techniques, such as barefoot running, may help avoid other problems but nothing offers a shortcut around the need to very gradually build tissue strength. Like all wisdom this is out there and frequently heard but even more frequently ignored. And very seldom truly digested and understood.
That is my current understanding of the way things work, painfully acquired. This is a hard truth, because excited athletes, feeling good, eager to take on new challenges, always want to overdo it, and don't want to hear about this. It's a drag. I wish someone had laid this out for me like this when I started this sport. Good chance someone did but I didn't want to hear it. But I hope this can help you, newbie athlete.
UPDATE: I have posted a refined version of the above graph.
Comments