Psychosomatic? (Read 547 times)

Allow me to lie back on the couch... I've been having a ton of injuries in the last few months, and this week despite taking 2 weeks off from running, I still feel a lot of pain. Here's what else is going on in my life right now: 1) big project at work, over budget, behind schedule, working lots of O/T, tons of pressure 2) Holiday preparation (decorating, buying gifts, wrapping gifts, mailing gifts, parties, etc.) 3) training for a marathon on Jan 11 (plus planning travel arrangements) 4) normal life stuff (kids, swim lessons, boy scouts, sports, etc.) Can a lot of stress in life cause muscles to become tense, and thus lead to a greater occurrence of injuries? I'm generally a tightly-wound person, and as I think back over the past few years, most of my serious running injuries have coincided with periods of higher stress in my life. Coincidence? (the funny thing is I used to run to relieve stress. But now training for a marathon and focusing on avoiding injuries has made running stressful too.)

It's not psychosamatic--you truly only have so much adaptive energy to go around. Life stress can absolutely lead to running injuries or illness, just like too much training stress can. Running for running's sake is a great stress relief. When it becomes work to stay on a training schedule despite life's other stresses, the stress relief benefits are counteracted. Whenever I'm training for a marathon the amount I'm running is way, way more than what's required for stress releif or general fitness and only adds to the total ammount of bodily/mental stress. The holiday season (which happens to coincide with the most stressful time of the year in my line of work) is when I just shut down and run when I feel like it--for those very reasons. But, hey, never mind that. You've got a marathon on Jan 11 so good luck!

Where's the ROTFLMAO emoticons Now I don't want to add to your stress.....and this is just my opinion.....you don't have enough training under your belt to do a Marathon on Jan 11th.......Unless......you are planning on walking and your cool with a 5 hr or more finish. Which I'm cool with.

I'm sadly aware of my unprepreparedness for the upcoming marathon, but I've lowered my expectations and at this point I''d be happy just to finish.