If you’ve been telling yourself any of these things:
→ “I just need to rest it longer.”
→ “I guess this is how my body is now.”
→ “I’ve tried everything and nothing works.”
→ “Maybe I’m too old.”
Let me push back for a second.
You’ve been blaming the injury, and I get it. But after years of coaching a wide range of runners through this exact thing, very often the real problem comes when a person has been resting a tissue that needed loading.
When you fully rest a tendon (or whatever else), it just gets weaker. Not stronger.
So yes, it feels better when you’re off it, but whenever you get back to anything resembling training, the pain comes right back. Because it’s gotten weak.
Rest. Flare. Rest Flare.
That loop is called the injury cycle and it’s not a sign of a hopeless body.
It’s a sign of a bad training strategy.
One time, a kid came to me who’d been in pain every day for four years after an accident. Four. Years. And not a small amount of pain either. What did we do? We found the load that his body could handle and worked to get him stronger.
Admittedly, it was not an overnight process and it took some trial and error. But a couple months later, he told me that he’d just experienced his first pain-free week since his accident.
Once you stop resting and start loading correctly, the tissue actually has a chance to get stronger and you have a chance to get out of pain.
I’m talking about this exact process in a workshop on August 19th.