On THE Road

WITH Joe LeMay

CONTEMPLATING BEING HURT

Before I turned 30, the longest I was ever out of commission for any injury was 10 days. I don’t even know what the injury was. It was some kind of knee pain that went away after a while.

As I might have mentioned in earlier columns, I hated being injured. My rule of thumb was “If you can run at all, even if it hurts, then run.” Some might argue that’s exactly the kind of thinking that will get you into trouble in the long run.

Peter Pfitzinger, 1984 and 1988 Olympic marathoner, wrote in arecent Running Times column: “One thing I would have done differently in my career would be not training through injuries. I would have taken more time off to look at the root cause of the problem and work on fixing it there.”

That is the conventional wisdom, and it’s not bad advice, but if I had to wait until everything was picture-perfect before I went out the door for a run, I’d almost never go running.

I would argue that the kind of compulsive behavior Pete exhibited in his training back in the 1980s is what put him on two Olympic teams. And who really knows if you’re really going to be able to address the root cause of an injury? Running injuries are infamously difficult to diagnose. It’s not like in football where some guy gets hit and comes off the field with something traumatic. You have the cause of the injury on film and have seen it many times before. For the record, a “traumatic” injury is something that happens all at once, such as getting hit by a bus or, as so often happens in my case, landing on a foot the wrong way and spraining an ankle.

Runners get more overuse injuries than traumatic injuries. I know a lot of people get confused on this one because I frequently ask people if their injury was traumatic, and they think I’m asking if it was an emotionally trying experience, such as when Mary Slaney fell in the 3000 meter run at the 1984 Olympic Games. I guess for runners who really love what they do, an injury can be traumatic in both ways.

Inany case, injuries are inevitable, and they happen more frequently as we age. The rather compulsive nature endemic for most runners that tells us to keep training at all costs only compounds the problem. It sucks, doesn’t it?

I did some research on the effects of aging, and it revealed a little more than what must be obvious. The good

© PHOTO RUN

November/December 2001