THE TRUTH about sports injury and managing risk as an older athlete

Forget the normal advice on sports injury. There is no advice in this article about keeping your head up and staying positive, about setting small goals you can achieve, even when you're injured. Or about even when you can't run, you can still do some exercises to make your arms stronger or work on your flexibility.

There is no advice about how getting injured can teach you a lot. About how it can show you how to listen to your body better, so you don't push too hard and hurt yourself again. Or about how it can also teach you patience because getting better takes time. Or about how it can make you think creatively about how to stay active and happy even when you can't train the way you want to.

No, this is about being honest about what causes injury and how it feels.

Sure, RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation) is important and can make a massive difference, especially in the first 24 hours. But, everything I read about recovering from injury tries to play down the difficulties. Let’s be honest: it hurts. And I’m not talking about the physical hurt, I’m talking about the mental hurt.

Lets talk about the real difficulties of getting injured when training for endurance sports, injury prevention, and also about risk management as it pertains to injury in endurance sports, especially for older athletes, and how it relates to other areas of life, such as work, family and finances.

I have a theory that most endurance athletes have mental health issues, and training for our endurance sport is a major way that we regulate ourselves and keep ourselves mentally healthy on a daily basis. And when we get injured, this impacts our ability to train and therefore it’s a double whammy because it also impacts our ability to maintain our mental health.

I had a near miss this week. It was the most minor of minor injuries. Luckily, it looks like I’m going to make a very quick recovery. It was just a minor foot strain caused by landing awkwardly on an unseen pothole in a puddle on a run. I got away with it this time. But it was enough to remind me of what the mental impact of injuries can be like.

Unfortunately, injuries are a part of an endurance athlete’s life. And as an older athlete, it’s one of the most important things we often think of, like a mantra: don’t get injured. But the reality is the human mind cannot go around all the time be hyper careful. We just live our lives, do our training, and it doesn’t take much for the slightest mistake to creep in.

People always talk about being mindful and yes, of course that is the goal, but the reality is that part of an endurance athletes’ success is often down to our single-minded approach. We use our minds to overcome physical discomfort as part of the training process, as part of our mental regulation, and that’s what sometimes makes it difficult to listen to the body when it’s trying to tell you that injury is close. The ideal is to train on the edge, pushing as hard as we can through the pain, but not through the pain that’s going to lead injury. But it is a knife edge and it doesn’t take much to fall on the wrong side every now and then.

On the (nearly) fateful day this week, with the benefit of hindsight, perhaps I should not have gone charging through the puddle that spanned the entire road. I was in the middle of a high intensity interval, and in that moment it seemed more important to me to maintain my speed and heart rate, so I took a risk. In this case it was not a good bet. Luckily, this was only a friendly reminder of the principles involved, because I got away with it this time. But as we all know it doesn't work out that way every time.

One of the greatest skills of successful athletes is to make these judgments, moment by moment, but when we are dealing with mental health issues such as trauma, through our training, this is not easy.

I just thought it’s worth being honest on the subject of coping with injury. What is your experience with injury and managing risk in your endurance training? Do you have the same approach to risk management in other areas of life or do you have a different to risk in say financial, business, family?