Out for 2 months, motivation gone

Backtosquareone wrote:

I'm a senior in high school. I ran 14:38 for 3 miles in cross, and had track PR's of 4:19 and 1:58 from junior year. Recently I had a bad shin injury that wipes me out from running for 2 whole months. I feel like my motivation is almost gone, and I feel like all my hard work and hopes are also gone. Has anyone ever experienced this? Need coping help

This happened to me in high school (injured with a bad stress fracture Junior year HS; but I was a little slower than you), and it took 9 months to just get back to my early Junior year times. I was so discouraged I didn't run in college. Now, 20 years later, I would kill to go back and run in college, and still wonder what might have been.

My advice, shake it off, get angry and see what you're made of. Good luck.

2 months off in high school is nothing. If anything, you will come back stronger thanks to the rest and stimulus of breaking back into training. You will feel terrible the first few weeks, but it won't take much more than 3-4 months to be back at 100%. Of course, you will need the same sort of training cycle and competition in order to get back to PR territory. But you have not lost it by sitting out for 2 months.

One of my biggest goals was to be all state, which is not really possible anymore as it is just a few short months and I won't be back by then

I was a sprinter during high school (not the greatest) and got hurt prior to start of my senior outdoor season. I was not able to run for a few months and became fairly depressed as it was obviously my last year for the team. In the meanwhile I just cross trained as much as possible so that if I did come back towards the end of the season I might be able get in some meets. Additionally I started to pick up other hobbies to help pass the time. I ended up running at a few meets and set a school record at our regional meet for a relay, so things did work out for me. I'm not sure if you can cross train but I would advise doing that and hope for the best. Also remember that you can probably still run after high school either in road races or in college (if not for the team then maybe for a club). I know that it hurts but you need to not let this setback define your life.

Its not uncommon for runners to get injured and cross train every day just to come back even faster, bike, swim, eliptical and weights almost every day and you will come back stronger and smarter than ever before

Your young. You will heal. Give your injury enough time and then get back after it. Two months is nothing. Injuries are part of running. Quitters quit. Runners run. Trollers troll. "Make America Great Again".

Take up cross training. I've taken 6-ish weeks off from running due to a stress fracture and worked my ass off aquajogging and lifting. Came back just as fit if not more so.

Yeah I'm a 4:30 guy who has been out for 2.5 months at on and off for .5 months.

I feel hell of out of shape, but I really just came back. Hopefully my fitness will come there. I ran high 420s last year, and I wanted to run sub 4:20. IDK about it now, but why should we not just freakin try? 2 months of hard work, atleast you will know you tried.

That's all we can do man. It's hard it really is. It made me depressed and shit, I put my heart into running and then bang.. injured. I cross trained a little with the elliptical.

I hope that fitness is in there somewhere.

-a senior

Don't worry, most of that fitness loss will be weight gain, imagine running with 140oz bottles of water on your back when you were in PR shape.

Yeah that's true.

I was 150 last week now I'm already 147. And that's gunna keep going down. I was like 140 last year in PR shape.