Don’t Be Afraid to Truly Rest

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We’ve all heard how important consistency is. We all know how valuable doing just a little bit every day can be. Over time, the little actions add up.

This is great when you’re feeling good and training for your goal. But what if you have a nagging pain? What if that pain isn’t actually going away on its own?

What should you do when everything you try either doesn’t help or seems to make it worse?

One of the greatest mistakes that I personally have made in my years of running and training for endurance events is not knowing when or how to rest.

For a long time, I always tried to do something every day. Something! Even if I had an ache or pain, I would try to do something everyday. Avoiding the pain point altogether or even making my activity for the day trying to do something to make the pain point better.

Some stretch, some exercise, some massage/mobility technique. Something!

It wasn’t until I got a bone stress injury (worse than shin splints but not as extreme as a stress fracture) that I truly learned the definition of rest.

When you’re dealing with a bone stress injury, during the initial stages, virtually everything you do can delay the healing.

Rest means rest. Not something to promote rest.

It’s hard for us endurance athletes to truly rest because we’re so used to doing something everyday. We’re so used to being consistent with exercising that truly resting feels like a sin against our guiding values.

Sitting on the coach and actually doing nothing can be very mentally uncomfortable. I learned the hard way that sometimes, what you need to do is literally nothing.
Sometimes, rest means doing literally nothing
Thoughts will run through your mind like:
“Am I going to gain weight?”
“Am I going to get out of shape?”
“Am I going to make it to the race?”
“Is this ever going to get better?”

And the thoughts are worse and more pervasive when you’re literally doing nothing and have more time to ruminate

But day by day, with your rest, you can feel the pain gradually decrease. You can feel symptoms getting better.

They’re not 100% gone. But they’re better than they were. Not quite ready to go yet, but on the path.

Patience

I’m speaking from experience…it’s hard to truly rest. But once you’re done resting, and you don’t feel the pain with daily activities, it’ll be time to get back on the training horse.

If you feel stuck with your injury or need any help with your return to run programming after an injury, schedule a free call with me to see how I can help you.

Your best is yet to come!

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