Listening to Your Body

Runners talk far more about injury than they do about health.

This is almost inevitable because one of the attraction of running is the way it tests the body's capabilities. Slightly faster or slightly longer the ratchet is moved upwards to see if we can adapt and become stronger. This happens but there is always the risk of misjudgement (call it a training mistake or just plain stupidity) and something, be it knee, foot, ankle, calf or hip, breaks down. Sometimes something damaged in an instant can take an awful long time to repair, especially as there is uncertainty about the precise cause. But at other times pain and discomfort signals show us the boundaries of our capabilities and warn us that we need to back off. If we listen we can escape with a near miss and continue to get stronger.

Injury or the risk of injury is ever present but luckily damage usually not debilitating and can be repaired. With care and attention we can be better again.

'Listen to your body' is the easiest advice to give but the most difficult to follow. Within the advice is a sense of otherness: that you are different from a body, which has its own limits that have to be discovered. The problem being that the messaging systems are limited and vague. Pain is certainly the most insistent and the one that grabs our attention but even then there needs to be sifting to see whether it is a twinge that can be treated as noise or whether it is a clear signal. Listening to your body can be very confusing.

So the emphasis has to shift from the difficult 'listening' to the almost impossible ie understanding your body. Where to start?

For me it is perhaps a two pronged approach. The first is to accept that my body is governed by the normal laws of physiology and learn from the experience of others (this might seem blindingly obvious but there is still a small part of my brain that hopes it can bypass the normal course of ageing). The second is to switch my focus and look more at what makes me feel good rather than what gives me pain. For example one hill session can leave me feeling tired but satisfied whilst another can leave me just feeling weary, when comparing them I should look more at what went right rather than what went wrong.

Perhaps I should start talking more about health than about injury