How a Debilitating Injury Changed Me as a Long-Distance Runner

As a marathon runner, on my college cross-country team, I had a great deal of extremely talented teammates. We were a Division III school where the focus was on academics over athletics. But it was commonly known that these extremely talented teammates could have run at Division I schools, but one thing held them back: injuries.

I saw some teammates spend more time injured and on the bike or in the pool more often than I saw them running. I saw some teammates suffer setback after agonizing setback, with stress fractures and medical walking boots every other week.

Almost every runner and athlete has an injury story that varies in length and severity. I, fortunately, have not suffered a lot of the injury bug. I have a smaller, more compact frame that makes my injury susceptibility lower than a lot of people. But I have had my fair share of injuries myself, being a runner for the past 15 years since middle school.

In the past few years, there have been one or two marathons where I had my calves and hamstrings seize and spasm during races. I wondered if this was due to a lack of stretching or just going out too hard past what my training made myself capable of. Sometimes, this would leave me walking or limping for a couple of minutes. By stretching more and running more miles and longer long runs, I have mitigated those spasms in my most recent marathons.

In my sophomore year of high school, I had some lingering lower back pain that seemed to flare up more at the end of the season. I had one more track meet to go where I had to run a relay leg of a 4×800 meter relay. The lower back pain started to get worse the couple days before the meet. I didn’t tell many people this, but I took an Advil before the meet so the pain would go away, and raced to the best of my ability. My back ended up being in even more pain, but I had several weeks off after the race that allowed me to recover and for the lower back pain to go away.

Just two years ago, I tore my hamstring while on a field day. As a teacher, I tried to race against the fastest 400 meter runner in the school in a sprint. I did no stretching, no warm up, and no preparation. I ended up not only losing to the runner, but would not be able to run for two weeks due to the hamstring tear. I am now wary of doing any explosive sprints of more than 100 meters without warming up because this hamstring soreness would tend to only come in those instances. After this hamstring tear, I couldn’t run for two weeks.

However, in my 15-year running career, I did have one injury that took me out for months. When I was in my sophomore year of college, I wanted to become a much better runner and become one of the best runners on my cross country team. I started to run more than 70 miles per week, which was the most on my team that summer and the most volume I had put in to that point. When I ran the 5,000-meter time trial at the beginning of the season, I underperformed. I felt some serious pain in my right hip that left me limping under the race. To be truthful, I started to feel that pain on my runs the whole week before, but I tried my best to ignore it or just hope it went away. Again, I told no one about this nagging hip pain.

Of course, I was 19 and just stupid, but the pain did not go away and only got worse. After that time trial, I could barely run at all, and this persisted for about three months. I would attempt comebacks only for hip pain to be debilitating again. I would regularly meet with our school’s athletic trainer, do rehab and stretches, only for nothing to seem to get better. There were points I couldn’t even walk without limping — so the fact that I thought I could run without limping in this time period was just delusional.

In college, injured runners would try to stay in shape through something called cross training. Cross training is using different forms of training and activities to enhance performance in a particular sport, which means runners who are injured will often turn to the bike, elliptical, or pool when they’re injured to maintain aerobic fitness.

I don’t know if other runners feel differently, but I disdained cross training. You have to bike for hours just to get the same aerobic benefit and caloric expenditure as thirty minutes of running. Not only did you have to do it longer, but it was significantly more mentally difficult. While running, I was often running with other people and engage in conversation that made the time fly by.

While on the bike, elliptical, or pool, I was more often than not alone, and in the pool, I couldn’t listen to music to make the time go by faster at all. Exercising in the pool was exacerbated by the fact that I could barely swim. I did something called aquajogging, where you put on a belt and make a jogging motion in the pool, which is also excruciatingly tedious and boring. Sometimes, I got pretty mad about being injured and not being able to run, and my teammates being on all these runs and activities I could not engage in. I would go so hard on the elliptical that, at one point, the machine started smoking and a gymgoer complained to the attendant. The gym attendant told me to calm down or else get kicked out of the gym. It was one among many moments of me taking out my rage and frustration in my cross training, not only so I wouldn’t have to cross train so long, but because I wanted to be in great shape the moment I came back.

At cross country meets where I hoped to be one of the top runners on my team, I was instead relegated to sitting on the sideline, helping my coach with administrative paperwork like recording times and splits of miles for my teammates. I distinctly recall waking up at 5 a.m. for a cross country meet where I didn’t run in the meet and just cheered on my teammates the whole race. It made me a great teammate who built a bond with my teammates and friends, but of course, I wished I could be on the line with them to start. I will say that there was one time when my coach sensed my frustration and recognized how much effort I had put in on my cross-training, and gave me the responsibility of pacing a race where we were hosting a meet. I had to learn the course by heart and bike faster than the lead runner to lead them through the course and make sure no one got lost. It’s a much bigger responsibility than it sounds like, because eight years later, I have been in races where the lead bikes have gone the wrong way and cost precious seconds off of times.

At one point, the athletic trainer wasn’t seeing much progress, so he recommended I get surgery. He said I had a torn labrum in my hip. All of a sudden, I wasn’t just wondering whether I would get healthy that season — I wondered whether I would get healthy to run again at all. Maybe that was a sign that I should just quit the sport entirely and focus on my academics more or other life endeavors.

My coach recommended I get a second opinion, and so he recommended I see a chiropractor that other people on my team had gone to with good results (who also took our student insurance). When I was younger, my father did not have a positive opinion of chiropractors, pejoratively calling them “fake doctors”. But seeing this chiropractor was a game-changer. He analyzed how flexible I was in both my hips and found I could lift my leg higher in one hip than the other when lying on my stomach. This showed that one of my glutes was much stronger than the other and that I had a severe muscular imbalance. He recommended I do a stretch to strengthen my glutes on the right side of my body, and after about a month of doing that stretch among others, I started running again.

By the time I started up again, I was in surprisingly good shape for someone who hadn’t run in months. A few months later, I ended up running personal bests in the 5k and 10k, and what started as a lost season ended up being a season that wasn’t the best, but a salvaged one, and I did not need any surgery.

If you’re a competitive athlete, injury is not only just an inconvenience. It is devastating: if so much of your identity is tied to your athletic accomplishments and athletic routines, once they’re not there, you’re in trouble. I had to find other commitments outside of running when I was injured because, of course, there was only so much I could do. I started to write a lot more, and I also started to devote more time to other clubs. I started to put more hours into my college job while recovering from this injury.

Also, it seems intuitive, but I also learned that recovery from injury is not this sudden, snap-of-a-finger proposition. It’s a long haul where there is a lot of time and rehab required.

I also changed as a runner. Instead of forcing effort and pushing past pain, even if it was in the form of an injury, I learned when to back off, when to listen to my body. I learned that rest, recovery, and stretching were just as important as pounding the miles. I learned the importance of proactively stopping problems before they happen by taking time off when needed. It seems trivial, but I wondered whether a lot of my muscular glute imbalances were the result of running in one direction on the track too often, and so I endeavored to change directions when possible or running on loops. But sometimes, you just get unlucky too and injuries just happen.

The most important thing I gained from my long-term injury is gratitude. It’s gratitude that I can run at all. When I see friends with injuries or chronic illnesses (usually Mononucleosis or Lyme Disease) that stopped them from running for very long periods of time, and the first thing I think is “at least I didn’t end up like that.” The second thing I think is that I agonize over times and paces so often instead of thinking about how lucky I am just not to be injured at all. I am 27 years old and still young, but I have seen my fair share of friends have to completely reshape and remold themselves and their identities after they could not run anymore. We tend to all be very intense and goal-oriented people.

Some people became super focused on bodybuilding. Some became a lot more career oriented and driven. Others may have gotten into biking or rowing when they could not run and became very skilled at both given their aerobic base. Injuries feel devastating, but as a runner, they are a reminder that we are a lot more than just runners. Even when we run, it is just a small part of our days. At most, it takes up a couple hours when there’s a long run if we’re not ultramarathoners. Running is not like other sports, like basketball or football, where you can practice the entire day. You can only run so much before your body starts to break down and there is a limit.

I think about what the world would be like if there are no injuries, and how many friends I had who could have had illustrious running careers and accomplishments if their hips, ankles, knees, and backs held up to the intensity of the training. I know that I can’t run forever and there may be one day where all my running may catch up in the form of a knee replacement or something else.

Ultimately, I try not to think about those things and just live in the now. I know and have experienced the suddenness of an injury or long-term illness. My hip injury made me realize I won’t be a runner forever. One day, this hobby that is a huge part of my life can just vanish.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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