Fight or Flight

Decision making when injury or illness interrupts your marathon training

"There’s a significant amount of judgment required, and I’ve seen runners make what I would consider wrong decisions in both directions," says two-time Olympian and exercise physiologist Pete Pfitzinger. "Some will line up sick hoping for a miracle, drop out somewhere after halfway, and end up much more sick. Others will miss one week with nine to go and figure they won’t be ready."

The Hard Questions

How much time have you missed? As a general guideline, if you’ve lost three or more consecutive weeks of training and are within two months of game day, scale back your expectations or, if possible, delay your marathon by at least the amount of time you missed. If you’ve been out one to two weeks, enjoyed a consistent block of training before the layoff, have at least four weeks before your race, and are 100 percent healthy, you can probably shoot for your original goal.

Pfitzinger emphasizes that gray areas are more often than not at hand. "You may have an injury that causes you to miss just tempo runs and intervals or makes you reduce your mileage by half," he says. "So the decision will often not be clear-cut."

Have you been injured or "merely" ill? If it’s the former, hopefully you’ve been maintaining fitness via cross-training, but you risk re-injuring yourself by diving back into regular running. If it’s the latter, your muscles and joints are presumably in good shape, but your ailment will have weakened you to some extent. If you’ve become friends with the elliptical trainer or the pool during your hiatus and a few days back on the road suggest that your body is ready for the rigors of marathon training again, you can probably return to your planned schedule of workouts and use these to determine whether your original marathon goal is still feasible. If, on the other hand, you’ve been knocked out by a severe cold, you’ll need a couple weeks of cautious rebuilding before you can crank your training back to its pre-malaise levels.

What type of injury did you have? "If an athlete has an injury that impacts training, I try to evaluate what type of injury it is," says Austin, TX based coach Greg McMillan. "Some injuries are debilitating when they occur, but as soon as they are healed, they don’t return. With these injuries, the runner is able to jump back into training rather quickly. Examples include tight muscles, muscle strains, and some cases of tendinitis. In these cases, a short 1-2 week period can be used to return the athlete to full training."