The Road to Recovery

Training has been a bit random lately. Work and travel and a foot injury forced me to do the things they always recommend in sports books when life gets in the way of training:

1. Sulk and be unpleasant to be around. I always find this helps enormously. It attracts sympathy and allows me to vent my frustration on the people I love. They understand, or pretend to.
2. Eat too much and drink lots of beer. Hell, if you can’t run, you might as well throw in the towel completely and get fat and intoxicated. Besides, enough beer makes you witty and handsome, so people don’t notice that you are stacking on weight, and they overlook your sulking and unpleasantness because your jokes are so clever.
3. Feel sorry for yourself. Whine. These are critical components of the recovery process. A good wallow can be all it takes for even your most loving friends and/or relatives to want to have nothing to do with you ever again. This rejection will fuel your self-pity, allowing you to sink even further into misery. Of course your foot is never going to get better! Of course work will always be disruptive! Time to grab a beer and a burger.
4. Lose fitness. Instead of hitting the gym or riding a lot, much wiser to sit down and watch television. What would happen if you got another injury? Besides, if you can’t run, there’s no point training.
5. Do some occasional stretching and icing, but not enough to make a real difference. Stretching and icing should be done just enough to remind yourself that you are injured and losing condition, but not to the extent necessary to promote healing.

Another way of looking at it is to identify the five stages of grief as they apply to running and training.

1. Find someone to blame. Work for not allowing time to train, the shoe company for making the shoes with which you trusted the care of your feet, the people who paved your trail, your parents for giving you bad biomechanics, God, the person who introduced you to running in the first place, Wall Street… You get the picture.
2. Do nothing constructive. Become a victim.
3. Wallow and complain. Why keep your problem to yourself? A problem shared is now also someone else’s problem.
4. Attempt a comeback. If it hurts, start at #1 again.
5. Take tablets and engage medical support quickly, before the body can heal itself.

If any of you are injured, I strongly suggest this time-proven path to healing. See you at the starting line in Austin.