Recovery is a Framework
All injuries are unique; your recovery plans should be, too.
Last week, we talked about starting out or coming back to running. This week, let's talk about how to deal with coming back from major lapses in your training regime. This is an expansion on my advice from last week, which had two options, depending on your situation:
Start at the very beginning, with a quarter mile.
Change up your route.
To get specific on this, I'm going to talk about my own experience coming back from a major lapse, which was when I needed to get back to running after childbirth. For everyone out there who will never be pregnant, don't tune out! Pregnancy is a specific experience, but you can use the approach in this newsletter to start running again any major setback.
Case Study: Childbirth
Long story short: I treated my recovery from childbirth like any injury. Childbirth itself, of course, is not an injury, but you can sustain injuries during it, especially if you have a Cesarean, which I did with my first birth, but also if you have a natural birth, which was my second experience.
All over the internet, you’ll find incredibly intimidating stories about women who ran all the way through their pregnancies, hitting incredible race paces and traversing impressive inclines. That’s great for them! What you don’t hear about is what happened the day after delivery, and that’s because…nothing happens the day after delivery or after any injury. We are not wildebeests who can gallop within hours of birth, after all. We’re basically bedridden, often in pain. Then, after the pain subsides, how might we best start to move again? How can we set ourselves up for success in recovery, getting back on the road as soon as possible?
Three Steps to Responsible Recovery
While no injury is like any other, over the years I’ve developed a three part recipe to shorten recovery timelines while remaining safe and working inside medical advice. Those parts are:
Listen to your doctors’ advice. They have lots of education on what your body needs as it recovers.
That being said, ask a lot of questions about their advice. You're a unique person with a unique injury and your doctor should absolutely have time to answer all your questions. They are people, too, so this can be a dialogue between the two of you.
Be creative in designing your recovery training regime. Your doctor knows the science; you know your body. There's not much utility in just sitting around waiting to be "fully recovered"; there's almost always some movement you can do to help yourself along. Propose paths forward for yourself and, if you’re uncertain about a movement or workout type, talk to your doctor.
Here’s an example from my recovery. My OBGYN knows I'm a serious athlete, so the conversation we had did not start at "don't exercise for six weeks", which is very typical advice. It started instead with "how to start running responsibly". In my first delivery, the C-section, I legitimately could not run for six weeks; the impact would be too much. I had undergone major abdominal surgery, after all! Instead, I went to low-impact barre and pilates classes, being very careful and aware of my abdominal scarring.
After my second, natural childbirth, my OB told me “no squats!” because of some stitches I had needed. Instead, we decided that I could start running as soon as the initial pain subsided, and I paid a lot of attention to how the impact of running was affecting my stitches.
In this way, my doctor and I were creating in how I was able to come back from childbirth, two different ways, each tailored to address the specific ways in which I had sustained injury. I’ll go into more detail on this in another newsletter, so look out for that. If you’d like to see it sooner rather than later, please let me know!
See you next week on the morning updates. If you haven’t signed up for those, please do! You can see them on IG and YouTube. Have great weekends, and for today, remember: go run!