Why injuries could be a blessing, a double post tuesday

Hey guys, so guess what it's tuesday, and today's post from me is going to be a bit short because Jess already did a post, but it's going to cover something t hat everyone will come across in their athletic career at some point or another.  The dreaded injury, and I'm going to bring up some examples of friends and myself included of how injuries aren't always a bad thing.  A staggering percentage of people will get injured training for their first marathon, something like 50% or close to that (don't quote me on it, I can't remember the exact statistic) but if you think about it, that's quite the daunting statistic that one in two people training for a marathon will injure themselves doing it.  Just take Jess and I for example, I was fine last year, knock on wood for this year, and jess not so much.

Injury is your body telling you that you're likely overdoing it, granted you can have freak of nature accidents such as hitting the curb the night before a big race that you would have a pretty good chance of winning (Andii) or you could just get a funny cut that doesn't heal up (Sara) or just overdoing it and having your body fight back and screw you over.  But ultimately the quickest way back to being healthy is to just rest.  If you try and half-ass your recovery and try to do some light work as soon as you're feeling a little it's not going to do you any good, honestly.  I took six months of rest, doing rehab exercises for 7 days a week for 6 weeks, after taking a ton of time already.  It probably was the best thing that's happened to me in retrospect, you learn that there's certain things that just aren't meant to be forced, and it'll just happen with a decent amount of hard work, and a big dollop of patience. 

So next time you get an injury while training for something big, take a step back, figure out if you were over training, or if it was just something that couldn't have been prevented.  Either way the next step is lots of forced rest, and that's the same thing with not feeling great after a training session, take a day off and see if you feel better after.  What you do after the rest changes depending on the situation though, if it was a freak accident, resume training.  If it was over training figure out why you did it, and then maybe pull back on it a bit.

Till then I bid all of you guys an injury free spring..... that is if we ever get it here in Calgary

~Cheers