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June15
HEALTH&FITNESS
COMMENTARY:
RUNNING
Toomuch, too soon – that’s what gets you injured. But when your
heart is set on something, it can be hard to heed the messages
your body is sending. For some expert local advice,
Verne
Maree
chats to two elite athletes – Aussie SUZYWALSHAMand
Kiwi BEN PULHAM – and, for good measure, also gets a couple
of pointers fromSydneysider physiotherapist SIMON RAFTERY.
W
hen I ask Suzy to tell me about her injuries, she laughs and
says, “How much time do you have?” She describes herself as
a very “fragile” athlete who was usually injured for at least three
months of every year that she spent racing on the track. “It’s
better now that I’m focused on stair-racing,” she says – Suzy is the current
world champion stair-racer – “but I still get injured if I do too much running.”
For those who want the gory details, her litany of injury woes includes:
“14 stress fractures (femur, fibula and tibia), a broken foot (it broke during a
race), a dropped metatarsal, two or three calf strains or pulls per year, several
hamstring strains and an achilles injury.”
Is injury inevitable?
According to Suzy – and she should know! – injuries are generally due
to a combination of overtraining, incorrect technique or biomechanics,
inadequate rest and recovery, poor diet, and not dealing properly with niggles
when they first appear.
“I’ve never met an elite athlete who hasn’t been injured at some point in
their career,” says Suzy. “When you’re pushing your body to the maximum,
it’s not surprising that things break down from time to time.”
Though Ben believes there are a number of things that runners of all levels
can do to lower their chances of injury – especially those who run purely for
fitness or pleasure – he agrees that it’s pretty inevitable that an elite runner
will suffer injury at some point. In his own ten years as an elite triathlete, he
says, he suffered from typically overuse-related injuries like runner’s knee
and iliotibial-band syndrome.
“But I always took a conservative approach to injury: I figured it was better
to take a day off in order to avoid a week off, or a week off to avoid a month
off. This approach served me well and for the most part, I was able to train
very consistently for 10 years.”