A few days ago I tumbled down some stairs and managed to bruise both of my knees. I’ve taken a break from running since then to prevent injuring myself further. It’s made me reflect on an injury earlier this summer where I aggravated my knee through overtraining to the point of not being able to run on it for a few weeks – right before the Seattle marathon. Fortunately, I got back to normal before the race, but it seems like injury is just a fact of training for me now.
Until recently, I’d been shockingly lucky in avoiding running injuries. I’ve been consistently running for a little over a decade, and this summer was my first “serious” incident of needing to take a break since I started. When I got into running, I ran nearly every day for several years. This was unwise in retrospect. Some combination of factors let me elude injury: being younger meant faster recovery, my legs had fewer accumulated miles, and I wasn’t running anything longer than a 10k.
I run longer distances now, and am significantly faster, both of which increase injury risk. To offset that, I also run less frequently – only 3-4x / week. I get a lot more enjoyment out of having a weekend long-run and shorter intermittent weekday runs than running daily. Running daily sounds more intense (in a positive way), but I find it to be less desirable along with being less sustainable. Rest lowers injury risk, and also prevents running from getting “stale”.
I think that’s why the injury breaks don’t bother me as much as they might have when I was earlier in my running career. Running is something I get to do, not something I have to do. While I still get rather frustrated at not being able to do the hobby I enjoy, this is a hobby I still want to be enjoying over the next 10, 20, 30 years. So, optimizing for multi-decade sustainability over short-term hotheaded push-through-it-ism seems like the wise choice.