Let's Talk About Running

Well, part of it is the way this kind of research is done. A "running injury" is usually defined as "anything that keeps you from running for more than a day, or causes you to reduce your training load". So "80% get injured every year" sounds like a lot, but keep in mind that this includes things like blisters, stubbed toes, and skipping a run because you feel a bit too achey after a speedwork day and take an extra rest day just to be on the safe side. Running, being an endurance sport, is especially prone to this kind of injury: running injuries often develop slowly and progress gradually, and are caused by repetitive stress; in other sports, injuries are more often happen in a split second, and while it may go wrong less often, when it does go wrong, it goes really wrong. The kind of sports injury that sidelines you for weeks or months, I believe, doesn't happen significantly more often in running than the average physical sport; running accidents very rarely kill people or cause severe brain damage.

That said, distance running does have a very high potential for repetitive stress injuries. Two reasons for this; one, it's an endurance sport. This means that you perform the same movement over and over and over, so any imperfection you have in your movement patterns will be amplified by sheer repetition. That little scraping in your gait, that you normally don't even notice, will give you a bad blister after 30,000 steps; the way your hip drops when your left foot lands is not a big deal for everyday activities or chasing a bus once in a while, but 10 miles into a run, it will start punishing your knee. On top of that, a typical running training regimen routinely involves exercising your slow-twitch muscles to the point of deep fatigue (a.k.a. the "long run") for the purpose of pushing that point up. Once you've reached that point, movement patterns will change to compensate for those muscles that are no longer capable of working properly, and this often leads to even worse running form and even more stress on the joints and connective tissue.

The other reason is that running is a high-impact activity; if you dial in the right amount of training, it makes your bones, joints, and connective tissue stronger, and more resilient against impact forces, but if you do too much, it's easy to overload your body. And because the kind of training stress we're dealing with often takes a day or two to fully manifest, it's easy to overdo - you run a bit too much, but it feels great, so you do the same thing again the next day, and it still feels great, but by the end of the week you suddenly feel super groggy and everything hurts.

And then there's the endurance athlete's mindset of "embracing the suck". Many of us are in it because we want to experience self-inflicted suffering, exploring and expanding the limits of our bodies. To a degree, this is healthy and the way to improve, but there's a fine line between suffering that is mostly mental, and little more than physical discomfort, and the kind of suffering that is plain old pain, a warning signal our body sends us, urging us to stop doing whatever it is we're doing. It's not always easy to tell the difference.

And finally, I believe a certain level of consumerism also plays a role. As in any other sport, many people are looking for easy solutions; but running is as simple a sport as it gets, there's basically just your mind, your body, and the road, everything else is mostly irrelevant (yes, this includes running shoes). So the usual approach of solving your problems by buying a product doesn't work, but there's a whole industry built around telling you that it does, and people fall for it big time. The treatment for knee problems is fixing your running form, doing strength training, and adapting your training schedule so that it doesn't hurt you; but this requires brutal honesty, and people are often more comfortable listening to someone who tells them that what they need is a particular kind of running shoe or sock or compression shorts or sports drink or whatever.

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