All of us runners have experienced the weird phenomena of having an amazing run one day, and a terrible run the next. Most often, when experiencing a bad run the pain is immediate. It may be struggling to keep a certain pace, losing your breath, stopping multiple times, or having pain in certain parts of your legs. Usually the pain goes away after you stop your run. Although the physical pain is harmless, the mental pain is more threatening.
Pain is a good thing, it reminds the body to be gentle. If you burn your hand on the stove, you need to feel the pain to understand you are injured. When it comes to running, you may still feel pain even after the injury is healed. MRI’s are often the perfect way to explore injuries within the body. But for runner pain, two MRI’s showing an uninjured person and an injured person may look the same.
So you may be thinking, how can we treat this runners pain? The first step is mental. There are many studies that show high stress and increase injuries. Pain is based on the body’s perception of threat; If the body believes that a certain activity is threatening to the body, you may feel pain. For example, if you set out on a long run that you’re body may not be able to handle at the time, you will feel pain in certain parts of your body that you may not have on your run the previous day.
For runners like me, it’s important to understand what went wrong. Sometimes it’s the weather, dehydration, stiffness, or not enough sleep. There are many things that can affect your run. You can not expect every run to be good. If you are pushing your body to new limits, you should expect to feel pain.
From your blog, I learnt that feeling pain is actually a good thing to our body as it tells us something is going wrong and it raises our awareness so that we won’t get injured when running. For runners’ pain, I also find that at the beginning of running days (maybe one or two), our bodies may not experience much pain, but as time goes on until the third or forth day of running, the pain starts, mostly in the legs. This regulation actually appears in terms of other kinds of exercises as well: after doing sit- ups for three days, our bellies hurt; after weight lifting for four days, our arms hurt… These symptoms are in fact all due to muscle fatigue. “Researchers and doctors are doing experiments aiming to find out how and why muscle gets tired”, but up to now we are not clear about the mechanism. This is what science is supposed to be as we talked about in class– a combination of certainty and controversy, and there are always something we don’t know. However, only when we are aware that there’s something we don’t know can we know more about this beautiful world.
Hi, your blog remind me of what happened during my senior high. I practice a lot for school’s sports meeting. That is 1500 metres race. After the race, I did a pretty good job. I should have a good rest after the game, but I think I can do more, so I keep tranining everyday. The result turns out that my knee joint effusion. That is the typical injure of an athlete. I can still feel pain if I overwalk today. This remind me that never push yourself too hard, expecially you are already at the peak.