WHEN RUNNING GOES WRONG: TENDINOPATHY IN RUNNERS

WHEN RUNNING GOES WRONG: TENDINOPATHY IN RUNNERS

Picture this: a faithful employee goes to work Monday to Friday, 8-4.

His alarm goes off at the exact same time every day, he has a perfect routine, and his commute is exactly 8 minutes long, leaving him two minutes to make a coffee in the office before his work day begins.

He is in his happy place.

BUT THEN One mundane Tuesday his boss pops into his office. His hours are switching, he’s going to work 6-4 instead of 8-4. And he’s going to work every weekend. AND his new workplace is on the opposite end of the city. His boss is not willing to negotiate.

Any reasonable human would go one of two ways: 1) Quit, dust off the resume, find a new job, start fresh.

OR 2) Completely internalize the issue until it eats you alive.

Now I understand the response of most of the readers will be “Man, that boss is a huge dingleberry,” but if we play the metaphor out, the “boss” is the undertrained runner, and the “employee” is the tendon. An under-trained runner abuses the snot out of his/her tendons, and the tendon does not have the option to quit, they have to completely internalize the issue, causing pain and dysfunction. Let’s put my horrible metaphors aside and dive into the actual issue: tendinopathy in runners.

As mentioned previously by my valued colleague Carrie, running is one of the most accessible forms of exercise out there. You can lace up your shoes, open your door, and run- it’s just that simple. The problem with running is it puts a significant load on your body, and many of our bodies can not handle that without training.

If you think of running from a biomechanical perspective, the problem of load becomes very clear.

Running requires the body to repeatedly launch itself into the air, land, and then launch itself again. A runner is essentially jumping off one leg, then landing on the other leg, hundreds of times, over and over. A body needs to be trained to absorb the load of landing, and subsequently release that load into another stride.

When a body is not prepared for such load things break down, and one of the most common problems is tendinopathy.

Tendons are the link between muscle and bone. They are dense, non-contractile tissues that are crucial to the structural integrity of our body and we want to keep them healthy. Tendinopathies ( AKA, pathology with tendons) occur commonly with a large change in load. When an individual goes from the couch, to the running trails, with little or no preparation, the scenario is ripe for a tendinopathy to emerge.

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