Training This Month: Is It Soreness, or Is It an Injury?
Every Hero hits this moment. You wake up in the morning after a long run, swing your legs out of bed, and something doesn’t feel right. Your quad. Your hip. The outside of your knee. You stand up, take a few steps, and ask the question that every marathoner eventually asks themselves: is this normal soreness, or is this an injury?
Learning to tell the difference is one of the most important skills you’ll build during training. Push through soreness and you get stronger. Push through pain and you sideline yourself for weeks, sometimes for the race itself. Below is a simple framework adapted from a great piece by the New York Road Runners with Dr. Andrew Creighton of the Hospital for Special Surgery. Three questions, asked in order, will get you to a good answer almost every time.
1. How Long Has It Lasted?
Soreness typically shows up after physical activity and clears within one to three days. Pain often shows up during or after physical activity and lasts longer than three days. If you’re still hurting four, five, six days after your last hard effort, that’s your body waving a flag.
A simple habit that pays off all season: jot down any nagging discomfort in your phone or training journal the day you first notice it. We almost never spot patterns in real time. We spot them when we look back.
2. What Does It Feel Like?
Pay attention to the words you naturally reach for. Soreness usually feels tender to the touch, tight at rest, and a little burny once you get moving. Pain feels different. It’s often described as sharp, stabbing, or uncomfortable in a way that doesn’t go away, and it can show up at rest, not just under load.
Try this: describe out loud what you’re feeling, in plain language. If the words coming out of your mouth are “tight” and “burning,” you’re probably recovering from a hard week. If the words are “sharp” or “stabbing,” that deserves attention.
3. Does Movement Make It Better, or Worse?
Here’s the most useful one. With soreness, light movement, gentle stretching, and an easy shakeout run usually make it better. Things loosen up. The first mile feels rough, the second mile feels normal, and by the end you’ve forgotten about it. With pain, the opposite happens. It doesn’t loosen up, it gets worse, and no amount of stretching makes it disappear.
Be honest with yourself here. The temptation to “run through it” is real, and it’s usually how a small problem becomes a big one. You can’t stretch away an injury.
When to See a Doctor
If your discomfort lasts more than three days, feels sharp, and doesn’t improve with light movement, stop running and call your doctor. A few specific situations from Dr. Creighton that need professional eyes, not just rest: if you suffered a trauma and have difficulty bearing weight, you likely need imaging (an x-ray or MRI). If there was no trauma but you have pain when you put weight on it, a stress fracture is possible. Get it imaged before you make it worse. And in most other cases, pain comes from overuse, and the right move is relative rest, ice, and possibly therapeutic exercise. If it doesn’t calm down, see a provider.
Protect the Long Game
Taking a day off in July to nip something in the bud is not a setback. Taking six weeks off in September because you ignored a flag in July is. The Heroes who line up healthy on race day are almost always the ones who were willing to back off when their body asked them to.
If you’re ever unsure, talk to your Heroes coach or your doctor. We’d rather you ask the question early than power through and pay for it later.
Heroes train smart. Listen to your body. It’s on your team.
This article is for general guidance and is not a substitute for medical advice from your own provider.
