Listen to Your Body?

Today was a beautiful day in San Francisco. I walked to the ferry building, and did a few 50 meter spurts of running on the way there. They were some of the sweetest, most glorious moments of running I have ever experienced—and definitely the highlight of my day, the rest of which I spent moping, and poking at my leg so much that I gave myself a bruise over the stress fracture site. With injury, some days are better than others, and today was a hard one.

When I got back, I read an article by Gina Kolata, the science journalist for the New York Times who really gets runners. She wrote about the old dictum to "listen to your body"—and how maybe it's a load of crap:

“I never listened to my body,” he said. “Maybe I should have. So let’s get that clear right off: I think it’s an impossible task.”

When he was training, Mr. Fleming said, he couldn’t train less or make himself go more slowly. And, he added, if you really listen to your body, you will not achieve what you are capable of.

Athletes need someone else, a coach if possible, he said, to tell them when to rest, when to take an easy day and when to work hard.

It's a hard lesson to learn, but I think probably a true one. There's so much anecdotal advice floating around the running community about how to avoid injuries, a lot of it coming from incredibly talented, accomplished, and seasoned runners. But it doesn't seem like any of us is capable of taking our own advice—elites get injured plenty.

Being injured makes me think about running even more than I do when I'm not injured, and over the past six weeks (my longest break ever), I've been thinking a lot about what I could have done differently to avoid such a long layoff. I could have taken more time off at the first sign of injury. I could have walked at the end of that one run where my leg was really bugging me. I could have cross-trained less vigorously during my time off.

But I did none of these things. Why? Because the thing that makes us good runners—that slightly obsessive drive that separates us from the non-running population—is the same thing that makes us so injury prone. We don't know how to stop.

Strangely, there's something comforting about those words as I write them. An injured runner is in a state of existential torment. Ok, that might be a little hyperbolic, but running is a huge part of our identities, and when we haven't run in weeks, we start to question who we are—or at least I do.

But if the quality that plants me so firmly in the running community is the same one that sidelines me, then I can rest assured that even when injured, my runner-identity is intact. A small measure of relief, but I'll take what I can get, and if that means 20-second spurts of running for now, so be it.