No two athletes are the same, except when it comes to one thing: injury. We’ve all been injured and we’ll all be injured again. I know that doesn’t sound particularly reassuring. Everyone wants to believe that their latest layoff will be their last, because staying sane throughout the recovery process is hard enough. The idea that it’s just one of many more to come might just push you over the edge. 

The physical pain of an injury is probably the least of it. The mental and emotional toll of having your primary form of self-expression, stress relief, and social connection stripped away without a chance to have any say in the matter is where the real pain comes from. The existential crisis that accompanies a debilitating injury isn’t something that most athletes can bear to imagine repeating. So we don’t. We soothe ourselves with the empty promise that we won’t ever make the same mistakes again and we’ll strengthen our bodies to be more resilient moving forward. But I’m done believing that injuries are something I need to eradicate once and for all. I learned from my latest injury that the “never again” mentality actually played a part in amplifying the pain I experienced and drawing out my recovery. It was only when I began to accept the inevitability of injury that the healing process really kicked off.

In February of 2024, I raced the Black Canyon 100k in the desert just north of Phoenix, Arizona. The first half of the race felt amazing—or at least as good as dodging cacti while barreling downhill on technical trail at full speed for 30 miles can feel. When the punchy climbs came in the second half, though, I knew something was wrong. I felt a sharp pain in my front hip flexor with every high step uphill. It was markedly different from the heavy legged fatigue that I knew to expect as the miles ticked by, and slammed the brakes on the momentum I’d created thus far. I watched time, rank, and joy slip away from me over the remaining distance as I grimaced to the finish. I took about a week off after the race to nurse my wounds (and my pride). The pain disappeared by the time I returned to running and didn’t come back throughout my next training block, which included a half-marathon PR and upwards of 70 miles per week. I wrote it off as mere muscle weakness, half-heartedly getting back into some semblance of a strength training routine for just long enough to say that I did. My bare minimum method didn’t hold up for long, though. The pain came back in the middle of the Leadville Silver Rush 50 at an even higher intensity. I ran the last 20 miles with a noticeable limp, crossed the finish line an hour over my goal time, and couldn’t walk a step for the next three days. My hip buckled under any amount of weight. No chance of writing it off as a fluke anymore. 

So, naturally, I did the opposite: panic. I spiraled deep down the Reddit rabbithole in search of a diagnosis while simultaneously scheduling a flurry of doctor’s appointments and calling around to find the cheapest same-day MRI in town (which was decidedly not cheap). The results pointed to a tear in my acetabular labrum, or the ring of cartilage that lines the hip socket. Answers didn’t do much to calm me down. This was the kind of injury that wouldn’t heal on its own. Strengthening the muscles in my hips and legs could help take weight off of the joint itself, which solved the problem for some sufferers. But surgery was the only true solution. 

I decided to go with the less invasive option to start. As soon as I got the green light to go off of crutches, I dove in with a zeal fueled entirely by anxiety about how quickly I could get back to “normal”. That looked like spending more time with my PT than at home while he turned my leg into a pincushion with dry needles, sweating buckets on the stationary bike in place of all my regular training (or more), hunting down niche anti-inflammatory supplements, and performing my assigned rehab exercises to absolute failure. I even got up in the middle of the night one time after realizing I’d only done two sets that day and did three more on the floor beside my bed. 

I called that discipline. I thought taking such an intense approach would earn me a quick recovery. I deserved it for working so hard and worrying so much. But there’s nothing guaranteed about the intricacies of the human body. The pain didn’t dissipate despite checking all the boxes and spending every second with at least half of my mind on the injury. Every note in my training log centered around intense scrutiny of my symptoms. At the urging of my running coach, who I subjected to all those chaotic self-analyses, I traded one of my weekly PT sessions for a therapy appointment. This was when the hardest work began. It just didn’t look anything like what I called hard work, because it involved doing less—not more. My therapist posited that the anxiety fueling my intense approach to rehab was stalling recovery. The mental load of fretting over the injury could be trapping me in a state of stress that wasn’t conducive to healing. I wasn’t giving my body the chance to flush the inflammation and reduce the pain signals. 

The goal became to normalize the injury in my mind. Treating it like a crisis had only given my body more stress to contend with on top of the injury itself. I reduced my cross-training time on the bike back to reasonable amounts, stopped doomscrolling through sports med forums, cut back on my PT exercises, and minimized symptom tracking. When I did notice a symptom, I practiced responding to it neutrally. “I’m feeling a pinch there,” I’d tell myself. “That’s ok. I’m ok.” By reminding myself that the sensations I was feeling weren’t inherently bad, I could keep the stress—and pain—from escalating. Lightening my mental load finally ushered in the physical relief I’d worked for all along. I’d just been working too hard in the wrong ways. After strings of cancelled races, I broke a course record and sent a 50 mile PR less than two months later. That’s not to say that it was all in my head. MRI’s don’t lie, and my pain was real. But my attitude toward the pain gave it a counterproductive amount of power over me. I had to stop fearing the injury in order to recover from it.

I know this won’t be my last injury. I’m certainly not looking forward to the next one, but I know it won’t be the end of the world and I won’t treat it that way. I’ll approach the rehab like business as usual and allow space for the adaptations to sink in, just like any other part of the training plan. Urgency only delays the process. It’s a lesson in trust that I’ll have plenty of chances ahead to keep learning.