Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.
Marcus Aurelius

This is a quick post to introduce a new category on my blog, “Tape me up, Coach!”. This category is dedicated to the numerous questions I get on the various boards such as Race with Purpose and TriScoop from novice and veteran endurance athletes who all at some point are likely to become equal members of the unfortunate club of the walking wounded.

There is a ton of information out there that will help you identify, diagnose, treat, prevent, avoid, minimize, mitigate and recover from common and not so common injuries. That said, I have found that the information isn’t necessarily organized in such a way that an already stressed out and anxious athlete can gain confidence and a measure of relief that they will get through this hurdle in a reasonable amount of time. That’s the main point to make here. Aside from extreme acute injuries such as the one pictured above, most injuries that endurance athletes encounter fall into two categories, overuse or due to improper biomechanics and technique. In fact the latter can be said to be a subset of the former because for many the training tends to illuminate the inherent muscular imbalances or biomechanical inefficiencies that were there in the first place.

Over the next few months, I’ll be writing how to guides for some of the most common injuries for our Race with Purpose fall 2007 marathon training program. When completed, I’ll also post them here.

Please don’t take this as some sense that I know any more than anyone else out there. There are a lot of great coaches and athletic trainers who know far more than I do. What I will do, is write these in such a way that they have already been found useful; to the athletes with whom I have worked with and perhaps this structure will be helpful to you as well.

The other advantage of posting this here is that you can comment on your own personal experiences around these common injuries. Think of this as a Wicki on injuries with a little bit of knowledgeable moderation. By sharing your experiences, you may be able to help the next unfortunate soul to get back on the road a bit sooner.

Cheers,
-Coach Adam