I Have Been Running For 15 Years and Have Never Been Injured: What's My Secret?

The cooldown can be as important as warming up.

Photo by Francesco Gallarotti on Unsplash

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I’m going to knock on wood before writing this post because just because I’ve never had a running injury, doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

Running is one of those sports where injury seems inevitable to some. Everyone seems to have a knee, hip, IT band issue, achilles injury or anything else in the lower extremities.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Injury prevention should become a crucial part of your training because if you get injured, you cannot train.

Here’s some of the key things that I’ve learned over the years that seems to be one of the reasons that I do not get injured while some other runners do.

Listen To Your Body

Sometimes you’ll hear advice about listening to your body but you won’t know what that means. It’s a wisdom you gain over the years that’s hard to explain. My rule with listening to my body is that if I feel any sharp pain that’s near my joints or tendons, I take it easy.

It’s tempting to want to push through the pain. No pain, no gain right?

Sometimes it’s good to push through the pain and it can be a way to get yourself better. Other times, it’s detrimental.

How do you decipher what is what?

My recommendation would be to take it easy anytime you’re feeling pain. It might not be fun at first but overtime you’ll learn what pains are what. Typically any muscular pain that is not a concern will go away in a few days. Muscular tissue has a lot more vascular tissue than tendons and ligaments so you’ll recover a lot faster.

With any tendon or ligament pain, be careful for it. You might need to ride the stationary bike for a little while to supplement your training instead of going out to bruise the joints.

Monitor Your Diet

Eating a well balanced diet has become a lot more popular with runners over the years which is a good thing. The old stereotype is runners eat whatever they want because they’ll burn off all the calories later. If you’re doing this, be mindful of what you could potentially be doing to yourself.

Getting adequate protein and collagen may not seem like it’s important to runners but it will aid your recovery. This study for athletic performance shows that athletes should aim to get at least 1.2-2.0g of protein per kilogram of body weight.

If you’re a runner doing strength training as well, that number is probably going to need to be higher.

Collagen is another thing that I take almost every day. Other than the side effects of my hair and fingernails growing at speeds I cannot keep up with (seriously I clip my nails every 3-4 days). This study showed that collagen helped reduce joint pain in athletes after taking it for 24 weeks.

Warm Up

I’ve neglected warming up most of my life. However, just because I wasn’t doing a formal warm up doesn’t mean that I wasn’t warming up before every run. I would start off my runs slow and steady and wait until I run about 1/2 mile before I start to take off for the real training. If a part of my body feels like it might need some extra work, I’ll would stop and work on it.

Now that I am more performance focused, I want every run to matter as much as possible. I’ll stop and do some of these for my warm-up.

• Leg Swings

• Lunges

• Calve Raises

• High Knees

• Frankenstein Walk

This is not static stretching. I would not recommend doing static stretching before a workout. If you want to do it afterwards, that is fine. Doing a dynamic warm-up like this one will help activate the nervous system and increase your heart rate to warm up the muscles.

Cool Down

Cool down is underrated. After a hard workout, it’s tempting to want to walk in your door and hit the showers right away.

Cooling down is more than stretching out your body and letting it wind down. It’s also a way to promote recovery. When you complete an intense workout, your parasympathetic nervous system is in over drive. If you have ever used HRV (Heart Rate Variability) in your training, this principle will make sense.

Often when we train hard, it’s more than just our body that’s been overworked, it’s also our nervous system. HRV is a metric that helps determine if our body has been overworked.

After every hard training session, I add in about 10 minutes of breath work and meditation into my routine. It may seem weird to meditate after ramping my body up so hard but that’s the purpose.

The sooner you can get your body into a calm state, the quicker it can recover.

Rotate Your Running Shoes

The general rule of thumb is to rotate your running shoes every 300-500 miles of running in them. I’m guilty for not abiding by this rule. I don’t have all my miles perfectly tracked with each shoe on Strava or really go by these rules. I have no idea how many miles I’ve run in my shoes.

What I do is I’ll go by feel and how my shoes look. If I’m starting to feel some shin or hip pain after running my usual distance, I’ll take a look at the bottoms of my shoes. Usually the treads will be pretty worn in and I’ll know it’s time.

In fact, this happened to me about a month ago. As soon as I got new running shoes, I felt like a new runner.

Another thing that I do is I rotate shoes. I have dedicated Vivobarefoot shoes for strength training and some short miles on the treadmill. I’m a huge believer in switching things up because a lot of injuries in running are repetitive stress injuries. If I’m slightly changing that, there will be less repeated impact in the same spot over and over again.

Change Running Surfaces

Last week, I wanted to get some miles in on an incline but I don’t have a lot of hills around me. I ran 5 miles in a parking garage up and down. What I didn’t expect was how impactful the concrete was going to be on my shins.

Sometimes, we forget how impactful the surfaces we run on can be. If you’re a city person like me, rotate in some days on the treadmill or run in the grass when you can.

This is usually pretty easy to do on easy days. I wouldn’t recommend going out on a tempo run running on a changing surface unless you are used to it.

Gradual Progression

It’s tempting when you’re training for an event to want to increase your training load as fast as possible. If you’re increasing your running volume by more than 10% a week, there’s a good chance you may be going to hard at it.

I’ve gone through the boomerang of increasing my running volume by 20% a week then back down -20% the next week, then back up 10% then back down again. The reason I didn’t get injured doing this was probably because I was listening to my body and I knew that I needed a break. This isn’t a fun thing to be stuck in. Do not allow yourself to ruin your next week of training all because your ego wanted to prove that you could do more now. Discipline is more than pushing yourself. Often discipline can be knowing when to hold yourself back.

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Running has been a joy to incorporate into my life. It has given me a freedom to know that I can run 50+ miles if I need to. Without running, I’m not sure what I would be doing to stay in shape. I would probably be lifting weights all the time but running has given me something different. It’s built a camaraderie of people who I build a connection to after every event.

I’m grateful to have gone all these years without injury. I have had plenty of friends in my run club that have been knocked out of running for 6 months because of a running injury. Injuries are not fun and take precautions with your body. It’s not bulletproof. There are tactics that you can do to make sure that you minimize the risk but that risk will never be zero.