Dealing with Injuries as a Runner: My Two Cents

Injuries are an inevitable part of training and I've seen my fair share of them over the years. I decided to create this compendium as a resource and starting point for other runners out there who are dealing with injuries and happen to stumble on this web page. This is not medical advice and if you are injured, you should see a doctor or a physio therapist.

I'm a big believer in injury preventing strength exercises which can both help you recover more quickly and make your body less prone to future injuries. There are plenty of great resources out there (Youtube, Reddit, and more) and you should definitely check them out. Below, I give a non-exhaustive account of injuries I've personally dealt with and, at least for some time, have managed to overcome. I also provide some exercises that worked well for me.

The Basics: Relative Rest and Progressive Overload.  Grossly oversimplifying, most running-related injuries are chronic overuse injuries and most overuse injuries are tendon-related injuries (see below). To treat a tendon injury, you need to keep track of two things: its capacity and the load you put on the tendon. If load exceeds capacity, your tendon starts to degrade (tendinopathy) and you may start experiencing symptoms such as stiffness and pain.

So in order to improve your tendon health, you need to build your tendon's capacity back up. This requires time and patience and it does not happen by itself. Instead you need to rely on two principles: relative rest and progressive overload. Relative rest basically means that you should not completely rest your tendon, as otherwise, you cannot meaningfully improve its capacity. While your symptoms may go away over time, returning to running may just lead back to a flare up. So instead, do as much as your tendon allows  without displaying a major increase in symptoms relative to your baseline pain. With this process, it is especially important to monitor your symptoms after a night's rest after your activity, as short term symptoms may subside, but long term symptoms may only show themselves after some time has passed. With time and patience, your tendon's tolerance should improve, which is known as progressive overload. Check out this great video going into far more detail if you want to know more:

What Can I do to Improve the Health of my Tendon? This depends on the state of your tendon and for how long you've had your injury. In general, finding a tolerable range of exercises that strengthen the surrounding muscles while not overloading them is key. I go into more detail for the injuries I've personally had below.

Can I Still Keep Running?  Again, the answer to this question varies and depends on the severity of your injury. You can often keep running, if you reduce your intensity and mileage and build back up slowly and respect the principle of relative rest from above. Doing less is never fun, but it's certainly better than doing nothing at all. Always remember that even a low amount of training will help preserve your fitness far better than doing nothing at all.

Start with a very low mileage and increase by max 10% a week. Take enough breaks (2-3 days between runs in my experience) and go slowly at first. Once you can handle this, you can try mixing in some stride intervals of 10-20s as a type of plyometric exercise. Don't mix strength training days with run days, as this may exceed your tendon's capacity and leave your in the dark about what part of your regimen resulted in a flare up.

Injuries I've Had (in Chronological Order)

09/2012-02/2014: Patellar Tendinopathy, Right Knee.  Got pain below your knee cap going down the stairs? Does your knee feel stiff when you're standing but loosens up when you're walking? Then you might have patellar tendinopathy. When I got it the first time, I'd just gotten into running and didn't really know how to treat it. So scroll below to see how I treated it when I got it on my left knee more than ten years later.

08/2019-10/2019: Peroneal Tendinopathy.  This one presented itself as an itch-like pain in the side of my lower calf. It resulted from a period  where I was experiencing with my stride and gait. I had to stop running for a few weeks and do ankle exercises such as ankle in/eversions, calf raises, soles raises, and towel lifts with my toes. Gradually went away completely within two months and increasing my turnover (rate of steps) a bit.

11/2019-12/2020: Proximal Hamstring Tendinopathy, Right Leg.  Oh, what a pain in the butt (literally). You know you have this one if you feel a dull ache right at the spot where your leg attaches to your butt that never really seems to go away and becomes worse with sitting or standing. To test for this injury, lie on your back, put your stretched leg on your sofa and press down. If this increases your symptoms, then your might have proximal hamstring tendinopathy.

This injury is caused by various factors such as overstriding and too much hill-work. If you have it, you should start with isometric and eccentric exercises (I usually go straight to the latter when I have a flare up). I like to alternate a few sets of single legged Romanian deadlifts, glute bridges with walkouts, nordic hamstring curls and hamstring curls where I use only the injured leg for the negative portion of the exercise. When I first got this, it took me many months to recognise that it was a tendon injury (I thought it was just a muscle strain) and equally as many months to get it to calm down to a point where I could go back to running.

If you catch this injury early, you can often successfully treat it with a few weeks of rest/low and slow mileage. Avoid hills and intense speed work. Threshold pace actually works pretty well for me with this injury, as my contact time with the ground is pretty short (which puts less demand on the hamstrings), but the kinetic energy from the movement is not high enough to cause a flare up.

01/2023-03/2023: Proximal Hamstring Tendinopathy, Left Leg.  When I got this injury on my left leg, I luckily knew what to do and was able to improve the injury rather quickly.

03/2024-05/2025: Patellar Tendinopathy, Left Leg.  Start with weighted, negative single legged squats on a slanted board and isometric exercises such as wall sits. Also, single legged isometric holds on the leg extension and leg press machines in different angles of extensions have done wonders for me here. Cycling also helped me a lot with this one.

When running: as usual don't do too much too fast. It is often ok to feel some increase pain relative to your baseline the next morning, but it should subside as the day progresses and be gone after 48h.