What to do if you feel pain from running?

Although there aren’t hard and fast rules for running while injured, here are some general guidelines:

• If you don’t notice any pain during your run, but have pain after a run or when you get up in the morning, it’s OK to run your usual run at your usual pace.
• If you notice pain during your run, but it doesn’t interfere with your normal running form, it’s OK to keep running, but stay close to home so that you can get back quickly if things deteriorate.
• If the pain becomes worse the longer you run, limit your running to however long you can run before this deterioration starts.
• If the pain causes you to alter your usual running form, don’t run with this injury until you can run normally at a relaxed pace. Running differently because of an injury will make other body parts more susceptible to injury, because they’re being asked to work harder than usual to compensate for the injured part that you’re favoring.
• If your pain interferes with your normal, day-to-day nonrunning activities, the only running you should even think about doing is to the nearest sports medicine doctor’s office.

If you’re injured and can run, or even if you just feel the beginnings of an injury, try to run primarily on flat surfaces. Running downhill increases the pounding on your legs, and running uphill forces your tendons and muscles to work extra hard. When you’re already flirting with disaster, you don’t need either. In all of these cases, consider taking anti-inflammatories and applying ice to the painful area a few times a day.

Should You Run on It?

Judgment calls are a big part of being a runner. You’re always weighing a seemingly endless number of issues in trying to answer some basic questions, such as how far, how fast, and when and where to run. If you’re injured, there’s an even more basic question to consider: Should you run? Here’s where injuries can get the most tricky. If you don’t run on your injury, it’s not going to bother you. Push this logic to its extreme, and it’ll never bother you—never run, and I can guarantee you that you’ll never have a running injury.
The standard medical advice for all injuries used to be: Don’t run for two weeks. If it bothers you when you start again, take another two weeks off, and keep doing so until you’re better. That’s not very helpful advice for most running injuries. If all runners stopped running every time they got a little ache or pain, some of them would almost never run!
What you want to know is how to finesse your ache or pain so that you can keep running without doing more damage. After all, a little knot in your calf that loosens up after 10 minutes of easy running is a lot different from an aching hip that makes you limp around the office, and then only gets worse when you try to run on it. How much and whether you should run with your injury depends on how it feels not only when you run, but also the rest of the day.

How to Prevent Running Injuries?

Even if you’re not injured, you should always be thinking about how to prevent injuries. Good running habits are so important, because the majority of running injuries can be prevented by eliminating the root causes. To eliminate these root causes, you need to increase the ability of your tissues to tolerate a force repeatedly and/or decrease the cumulative amount of force.
You can increase the ability of your tissues to tolerate repeated forces by doing the following:

1. Regularly stretching the major muscles, tendons, and ligaments that are worked when you run.
2. Correcting muscle imbalances that require a given body part to work harder when you run than it’s designed to.
3. Increasing your mileage and intensity gradually so that your body has a chance to adapt to an increased workload.

The second main way to prevent running injuries is to regularly reduce the cumulative amount of shock that you subject your body to. Among the ways to do that are the following:

1. Running on soft surfaces, such as dirt and grass, whenever possible.
2. Running in shoes that have adequate cushioning and that have extra cushioning in the appropriate place if you land hard on a certain part of your foot.
3. Running the appropriate number of miles to meet your goals, not just mindlessly amassing miles. Even the best-constructed body will eventually break down with too many miles.

You’ll also reduce the amount of shock to your body if you run at an appropriate weight. Beginning runners who might be overweight should therefore be especially careful about running on soft surfaces in well-cushioned shoes.

Are Running Injuries Inevitable?

One runner I know suffered a broken rib when he tripped during a run. Another I know broke his arm when he didn’t see a low chain-link fence during a dark morning run. These are freak occurrences. They sound like the kinds of injuries that skiers and football players get—random, acute events. Most running injuries, in contrast, are overuse injuries—they stem from repeatedly stressing an overworked body part and ignoring the early warning signs that something is wrong.
Why do runners get injured? Remember, when you run, your bones, muscles, tendons, and ligaments deal with forces of at least three times your body weight with each step. In order to continue running, your tissues must be able to withstand these loads, even when they’re repeated thousands of times per day. An injury is a failure in your body to handle these repetitive forces.
What causes muscle strains, tendinitis, ligament damage, and stress fractures? Either the forces to which body parts are subjected are too high, or they’re repeated too many times. In other words, injuries occur because of too much impact shock with each step, the cumulative effect of too many steps, or a combination of the two. Most running injuries occur because of the repetitive nature of the running stride. When repeated thousands of time per run, even a slight imperfection in how your feet roll through the gait cycle, for example, can lead to problems nearly anywhere in your legs. That’s why you need to take a global view of a running injury—you want to look at not only the area that’s bothering you, but what about your running is causing that area to hurt.
Conquering your injury, then, means two things: treating the immediate symptoms, and figuring out what went wrong to cause them. Take care of the symptoms, and you get to start running normally again. Figure out and eliminate the root causes, and you’re more likely not to be sidelined by that injury again.

Running Injury

Being injured is the pits. Many times, you can’t run at all. Even if you can run with your injury, you usually have to cut back on your usual distance and slow down. Your running just isn’t as much fun. Suddenly, your running, which is supposed to help with the stress in your life, adds to it.
Unfortunately, injuries are a part of the sport, and a common one at that. By some estimates, more than half of all runners are injured enough every year to have their training interrupted for more than a week. Now that I’ve completely depressed you, here’s the good news—injuries are common, but they’re usually predictable and preventable.
Most running injuries come from trying to do too much too soon at too quick a pace and ignoring the body’s signals that it’s on overload. So before looking at how to treat common running injuries, I’m going to show you how to avoid them.

Thigh Therapy

Thigh muscle imbalances happen to the best of us. Long-time runners are more susceptible to this imbalance than are beginners because with a lot of running, the abductor muscles (on the outside of your upper thigh) get stronger while the adductors (on your inner thighs) aren’t worked all that much. The problem is that these muscles are supposed to rotate your hips through a full range of motion, so when the adductors become too weak, and the abductors have to do too much work and you get hip pain. If you have this problem, strengthen your adductors by sitting on a chair with a soccer ball between your thighs and squeezing the ball several times.

Below-the-Knee Balance

As with your hamstrings and quadriceps, your calves may get too strong and tight while your shins get relatively weaker when you run regularly. You might have this imbalance if you have chronic Achilles tendon problems. To strengthen your shin muscles, write the alphabet in the air with your big toe. It sounds strange, but try it. You’ll feel right away how effective this exercise can be.

Upper Leg Equilibrium

Ideally, your quadriceps (your thigh muscles) should be about 25 percent stronger than your hamstrings. In other words, if you were to go to a gym, you should be able to lift 25 percent more when doing leg extensions (which work the quadriceps) than when doing leg curls (which work the hamstrings). But running can overdevelop your hamstrings while doing relatively nothing for your quads. An imbalance in the strength ratio between the two muscles might show up as chronic knee pain because the tendons around the knee can become strained by having to work extra hard to compensate for tight, too-strong hamstrings and relatively weak quads. When your quads are stronger, they can absorb more of running’s impact shock that is otherwise distributed to the knees.
If you have an imbalance in this area, try this at-home remedy. Fill a gym bag with shoes. While sitting on a chair, dangle the straps of the bag across the top of one foot. Lift the bag by straightening that leg. Do this exercise 12 times for each leg.