Learning to trust our body after injury

We don't often talk about one of the most difficult part of runners coming back from injury: learning to trust your body again.

Often an injury can feel like a betrayal. Our body has let us down. We are unsure about returning to our previous form. It’s also scary to move forward, whether that’s just starting to run again or beginning to push harder with longer or faster workouts.

Just as you have to build back your running and strength from injury, giving yourself time to heal, slowly testing your health; You have to build back mentally.

It's a scary process that has it's ups and downs. How you approach training mentally is just as much a key to success as how you approach it physically.

Here are the four mindset shifts that are essential as you return to running and racing:

Recognizing that you may still (will likely) have soreness and discomfort- This does not mean you aren't recovering or progressing in the right direction. Discomfort may, unfortunately, be part of your running life for now. Injuries don’t magically go away overnight. Part of the healing and recovery process is discomfort. Just work with your medical team to ensure you know the difference between problematic pain and general soreness.

Progress will not be linear - There will be periods of time where you think things are going great and you're feeling much better. Then the pain returns or you have a few bad days running. This is completely normal. It doesn't mean all of your progress is lost. Healing is a series of adaptation which has its own ebbs and flows. It is important to use your pain levels as a barometer of how hard to push yourself, but an increase in pain just means pulling back for a bit. It does not mean that you have undone all of the progress you have made or that you are not on the right track.

It’s not all or nothing - Rarely is recovery all or nothing, healthy and injured, running normally or complete rest. Maybe your training is a run/walk program for now; maybe you are doing less mileage; maybe you can only do part of your planned runs. That is ok; it doesn't mean you are failing, it just means you aren't there yet. Returning from injury is a spectrum that you move along. Take the small steps and celebrate them because those are wins too. They all add up over time.

You’ve changed - You are not the same athlete that you were before the injury, either physically or mentally. THIS IS NOT A BAD THING. Usually there is a reason that the injury occurred in the first place, you can build back to be a stronger runner than you were before; you are more in tune with your body; you know that you can overcome hard things. Embrace where you are now and where you're headed as a better, stronger, more resilient version 2.0.

Learning to rebuild trust is essential for runners to be able push themselves to their limits in races. The trust of an athlete in their body is fundamental. We have to work to heal and rebuild that, just as we work to heal and rebuild the physical injury.