Late-season races have a lot of good to offer: redemption opportunities, a way to cap off your year, a time to take advantage of the giant base of training you’ve amassed. They also offer the opportunity for sudden injuries cropping up right before your last race. A niggling hip injury, new foot pain, a groin pull can out of nowhere happen just at the worst time, as you enter the prep phase of your race training. What do to when you feel an injury just as your race approaches? Throw everything at it.
It’s October and you are ramping up for Kona or Ironman Arizona. You are shocked to feel your plantar fascia on fire or to wake up with a bunch of crud in your chest. Panic tries to work its way into your mind. “What about my race?!? Why now? All that training down the drain? Aaargh!!!”
What to do now? Everything you can. Throw everything at it.
1. Get your mind right. There is no reason to panic, and panic does not help you. The actual facts are, you have a great deal of fitness after a summer of training and racing. A little time off right before your race can really help you. Remain calm.
2. Go see your massage therapist, physical therapist or physician, depending on the nature of the issue. Get body work done and let it soak in.
3. Make the best use of your forced time off. If you have to stop some aspect of your training, then what can you do with the new time you have on hand? If you can’t run so much, can you do some more swimming or core strengthening? Or even take some more rest? You can also use this time to study the race course and put your race plan together, then mentally rehearse the day you intend to have.
4. Use your mind power to hasten your recovery. Think of something that heals itself quickly, such as when you smack your funny bone. It hurts like heck for a few seconds, then it just goes away. When you have selected your automatically-and-quickly-healing example, take your injury and in your mind’s eye move it into the quick healing spot. And leave it there.
Throwing everything at it has its issues. First, it interferes with the scientific experimental value. When you receive Graston, dry needling, acupuncture, deep tissue massage and mental healing (step 4), which one or which combination was most helpful? There is no way to know, but the important thing is that your condition improved.
Second, too much of a good thing is too much. You can get too much treatment, which can delay the healing that the treatment is supposed to induce. A deep tissue massage on top of a deep tissue massage isn’t optimal. Try to remain reasonably sane about what kind of treatments you take, how much and over what period of time. Time is an essential part of injury or illness recovery. You can only hurry it so much, so get the right kind and amounts of treatment and let your body do its magic.
When race day is coming up and you find yourself somehow impaired, throw everything at it, but in moderation.
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