Learning to trust your body again.
For sports people returning to training whilst living with Mindbody Syndrome.
This is an article aimed at sports people that have a good understanding of Mindbody Syndrome, are convinced that they have Mindbody symptoms and have been cleared to exercise by a qualified medical professional. Written for those that are looking to re-introduce themselves to training.
Here I share some of my experiences of successfully re-introducing running after being unable to run for 15+ years.
The challenge for sports people
Re-introducing activities that have been avoided is challenging for any Mindbody patients. However, for people that are exercising for sport and for increased performance I believe that there is often an extra layer to un-pick. That layer is caused by the fact that a tough training session can be painful and of course we have the natural and usually harmless phenomenon of Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) to add to the confusion.
My starting point was not being able to run for more than 2 mins without a severe flare up of back pain and sciatica. This was pain that regularly left me unable to walk, turn over in bed or even sometimes just lie still without excruciating shooting pains. It wasn’t just running I was afraid of it was a myriad of physical activities.
Fear
Having dedicated a lot of time to journalling I had already surfaced and let go of a lot of repressed grief and anger. I was mainly pain free, knew the patterns that caused my symptoms to flare up (usually anxiousness about change), had re-introduced all other activities but was still scared of going running. The reason being that just below the surface there remained some doubt. What if I was wrong? What if running would cause me irreversible damage? What if those bulging discs and degeneration shown on my MRI scan were the cause of my pain? It was these thought processes that needed further exploration. The creation of an evidence diary was essential to overcoming these thoughts. An evidence diary is a section in your journal where you capture all the evidence from personal experience that reassures you that your pain is not structural. For example, I threw caution to the wind once and played football with my nephews for 10mins but the pain didn’t arrive. That experience made a diary entry.
Visualisation
One of the practices that I would do regularly before going to sleep was visualising a pain free run. I would try to make it as vivid as possible. I would imagine the sensation of bounding down a hillside with the cold making my cheeks blush red, the strong sideways wind trying to blow me off course and the rain washing a salty stinging sweat into my eyes. I am loving every minute of it, feeling strong and pain free. It is hard to correlate the direct impact this had but I am including it because it was part of my recovery journey. I suspect that this exercise played a part in the re-wiring of my brain to remember what pain free running feels like.
Hyper-sensitivity
On a number of occasions, I attempted to run and positive think my way through the process but failed miserably and ended up hobbling home in pain. It was almost like I didn’t believe the positive affirmations. I was running in anticipation of the pain. This resulted in my body not being relaxed, muscle tension and a change in running gait. A slight niggle that I would have previously shrugged off in my younger days as my body warming up seemed to put me in a state of hyper-sensitivity which fired up old neural pathways and delivered the pain that I was anticipating.
Running whilst in pain
Ultimately the experience that convinced me 100% that all my symptoms were Mindbody related was an experiment that I conducted on myself. I was going through a change at work that had caused me a pain flare up. I was 95% sure that this was Mindbody pain and not anything structural so tried to go for a run. I am not exaggerating when I say I could barely put on my running shoes, I was limping with a horrible twisted gait and stopping to yelp with a shooting pain every now and then. I began to shuffle very slowly, I breathed deeply, repeated over and over to myself, “my body is strong, I can relax” and I just persisted. Slowly, slowly the tension in my body eased and 20mins later my pain was gone and I was sprinting through the park. That is when I knew for sure and it made a big bold entry into the evidence diary!
Playing with the pain
After this incident I believed that that I was physically well and started to train more seriously building my distances eventually to a full pain free marathon. However, there were still some set-backs along the journey. Whilst I was no-longer getting severe sciatica or back pain attacks I did experience uncomfortable sensations and muscle tightness which even though I knew were triggered by life stresses, not the physical exertion, did affect my running. However, I was now conscious enough of the doubtful thought patterns and pain that I could play with it. Whilst running I would try to feel the shape of the pain. I would try to imagine its colour; I would make it smaller and bigger. I would run with my attention on the pain and then move my awareness to another part of my body. Sometimes I would put attention on the pain and it would just disappear. Sometimes my mind would wonder into a day dream before I woke up a couple of miles later to realise the pain had gone. Another entry into the evidence diary!
Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness
If you have experience of training or exercising with the goal of improving performance you will also know that it is natural for muscles to ache the next day. One or two times, my brain did seem to get confused with the DOMS, that hyper-sensitivity would return along with some over analysis and it did trigger a pain attack. I think in hindsight this is just the process of re-learning that pain can be harmless and even positive. Reframing the DOMS as the body repairing itself and becoming stronger along with revisiting the evidence diary seemed to fix this. I think it’s important to be OK with set-backs. Success with this approach is not always a smooth straight line.
Running as a meditation
One of the benefits of going through this process is becoming aware of your thoughts and emotions and physical sensations. As the Mindbody pain subsided I used the opportunity of this new awareness to use running as a meditation. I invested in some barefoot/minimalist running shoes and on recovery runs would combine the sensation of feeling the ground beneath my feet with slowing the breath right down and trying to just watch thoughts coming in and out of my mind for the duration of the run. You also have the benefit of building strength in the ankles and supporting tendons as they re-learn a more natural running style without all the expensive support and cushioning in modern trainers. However, if you are new to barefoot style running you need to build the distances slowly as your feet and ankles have become used to being wrapped in a comfort blanket!
An interesting observation
I had another experience that I feel is worth a mention. During the pandemic lockdown in 2020 I ran a new route twice and both times developed knee pain that was enough to make me stop and hobble for a while. The pain “ran off” both times but it was enough for me to have a quick journal about what might be happening. Through journalling I realised that the route went past the back of an old friend’s house that I was very competitive with at school. I avoided the route for a while but went back once I had worked this out and didn’t have any problems. Hello again evidence diary!
Gratitude
I am now in year 3 of pain free running and it’s become the norm. However, every now and then when I am out running, I forget that not so long ago I couldn’t do this. I might look at my watch and be disappointed with my pace or my heart rate or the weather, but then I wake up and get this immense feeling of gratitude, joy and disbelief that at age 43 I am bounding down a hillside with the cold making my face blush red, a strong wind trying to blow me off course and rain washing a stinging salty sweat into my eyes and I love every minute of it because I feel strong and I AM PAIN FREE!
In conclusion
Whilst we are waiting for the world to become more readily accepting of Mindbody Syndrome I hope that sharing my experience of returning to running can be of some benefit to you and perhaps even make an entry into your evidence diary! So long as you are cleared to exercise by a qualified medical professional my parting advice would be to stay hopeful and persist. Running once and getting a flare up doesn’t mean that you need to stop. It just means there is some more journalling to do. I feel fitter now in my 40’s than I did in my 20’s. Experiment, keep going, build the evidence and train mindfully!
