Doc On The Run Podcast

Yesterday I was speaking to an ultra-marathoner who had a metatarsal fracture.     Fortunately, the broken bone has been healing well and she's back to running.    But during our discussion yesterday she revealed something interesting. She was running every day.  Just 3 miles…every day.   During that discussion I was trying to help her understand how it is that running every day, even short distan...

In the pursuit of any running goal you really are only in competition with yourself.   When you become injured, you immediately give yourself an underdog status.   You start to think about all of the problems that your injury presents to prevent you from completing the workouts that you previously believed would make it possible for you to achieve your goal.    Of course, none of that is true. All...

Can you get faster by not running?  Can get stronger by not working out? If you're a runner and you’re listening to this my guess is that you're clear answer to both of those two questions is “NO!” And if your answer both of those questions is no… Why do doctors call rest a treatment plan? The brutal truth is that rest is not a treatment plan. Today on the Doc On The Run podcast were talking about...

Healing after a hard workout and recovering from a running injury are basically the same process. But when a runner gets an over training injury everything goes sideways.  We become confused about what has happened and we start to confuse ourselves about what what should happen next. We get off course. We forget the basics.  Our self induced confusion delays our recovery, hampers our healing and k...

I was just invited to give a lecture at the International Foot & Ankle Foundation’s 42nd Seattle Seminar. I was asked to give a lecture entitled “Potential Complications of Returning Athletes Back to Activity After Injury.” The very last question of the entire weekend seminar was directed to me. “Dr. Segler…How can you work with injured runners all day?” Today on the Doc On The Run Podcast we’re t...

Your identity as a runner is crucial to your running goals. You cannot run a four hour marathon if you cannot imagine it, cannot visualize it and cannot believe it is possible. You must believe to achieve any goal. It's interesting to me that so many runners understand how visualization of achieving the goal is absolutely critical to finishing a marathon within a specific goal time.  Yet these exa...

Sesamoid injuries can be serious and can keep injured runners running. Sesamoids are small fragile bones and if they become inflamed and turn into a stress fracture they can crack, break and become permanently damaged. If you have surgery to remove a permanently damaged sesamoid bone, your foot will never be the same. Our guest today went through a long battle with a sesamoid injury and then got b...

Today on the Doc On The Run Podcast we are talking with Jonathan Ellsworth, founder and Editor in Chief at Blister AND host of the Off The Couch Podcast about how we can assess running gear reviews, decide when we should try something new, and how new gear isn’t always better, just because it is different.train

Ultra-marathon by definition means running lots of miles on trails. That's a lot of opportunity to get injured! One of the best parts of running is social interaction. But it's not always easy to find the right group of runners for you. If you find if you find a local running group you'll get advice, encouragement and guidance that may help you train harder, run longer and avoid injuries. If you w...

Sooner or later, all of us will have to deal with some uncertainty and adversity in making it to the finish line. Right now, obviously there's a lot of uncertainty for athletes in training…having difficulty just making it to the starting line. Many runners have to cancel events a goal race because we get sick or injured. Overtraining certainly has a much higher probability to disrupting your goal...

Arthritis of any type can cause a lot of pain when you run. The word “arthritis” really and truly just means inflammation within a joint. There are lots of different kinds of arthritis.  But in general when a runner hears a doctor deliver a diagnosis of “arthritis” it's pretty easy to start thinking your running days are numbered.  But sometimes you just need a shift in perspective. If you’re runn...

Find your why. Write it down. Just live towards that. Jonathan Flores is the host of the Run With Purpose Podcast. He is also a runner who set out to run 50 marathons in 50 states, which obviously requires a lot of effort and a knowledge of running recovery to avoid injury.  Jonathan understands how to recovery, how to stay on track when plans go sideways, particularly through intention setting an...

Carrie Tollefson is by any standard and elite runner. Olympian. 13-time State Champion. National record holder for the most consecutive cross-country titles. First person in NCAA history to win both the 3,000 and 5,000 meter titles. 5-time NCAA. NCAA Indoor Track Athlete of the year. And if all that isn’t enough, Carrie has been on the cover of Runner’s World magazine 5 times! She has ben running...

Today on the Doc On The Run Podcast we are talking with Jonathan Levitt about the strategies he uses to recover quickly after hard training blocks, or an Ultra before resuming training. I am sure most of you listening know Jonathan Levitt as the host of the podcast For The Long Run. Fortunately for all of us, he is taking time out of his schedule and away from his microphone to join us here and pr...

Kim Conley: 2-time Olympic athlete and middle and long distance track star. Part of what I find so inspiring about Kim is the way in which she has pulled it out and come back in the final meters and final seconds of races to secure the win.  We're really fortunate to have Kim on the show today to share some of her strategies and tactics that have helped her stay fit, train hard and recover after a...

If you want to complete an ultramarathon, you will have to put in lots of training. One of the big keys to successfully training for an ultra-marathon is to log lots of miles without getting sick or injured.  Ken Michal has stood on the starting line of almost every significant ultra, including Western States 100 and multiple rounds of the HURT 100.  And when I asked him about what it takes to suc...

Lucy Bartholomew went from running with her dad at age 15 to finishing on the top of the podium at some biggest ultras around the globe, all while setting course records in the process.  Not surprisingly, her travel, training and race schedule keeps her pretty busy so it has taken almost a year of trying to get Lucy on the show, but with some luck we are able to have her here today to talk about h...

When I was running yesterday, we were noticing a couple of things that may put people at risk. And so, I was thinking about three simple ways you can really decrease your risk of exposure and keep true social distance, which I believe should be more than six feet. There's a couple of simple ways to think about this. The first thing is to stay away from people. And then, the second thing is that wh...

The biggest difference in speed of recovery is motivation. Your motivation leads to the actions required to heal and recover as quickly as possible. Healing is not a passive process. If you're just sitting around waiting for some specific timeline to make your injury go away, you're making a big mistake. The only guarantee in the waiting-to-heal-plan is that you're guaranteed to lose all of your r...

I listen to lots of podcasts and I recently have heard lots of other speakers in all genres talking about how important it is to stay healthy and avoid illness, and reduce your risks or contracting Covid-19.   All of these people are right. Now, more than ever it is important to maximize your immune system.  In thinking about that, I realized that all of these same strategies people are talking ab...

Right now all of us are inundated with rapidly changing circumstances and a wide variety of news stories about the coronavirus. With all of the uncertainty, none of us really knows what we are supposed to do. As a doctor who focuses completely on helping injured runners get back to running, most of what I do Is recognize mistakes in training and the recovery process causing failure.  But what I do...

Yesterday I was looking at the latest news story about the coronavirus lockdown in Italy. Strict lockdown.  Don't go out of your house.  Government orders.  And the representative image in the news story showed a street scene of beautiful Italian architecture in Florence Italy.  There was only one person on the street. And that person was a runner, who was running. So while we are afraid to go to...

I was on stage at the International Foot & Ankle Meeting in Lake Tahoe this weekend and was giving a presentation designed to help doctors understand why running isn’t the problem with running injuries....why they as doctors shouldn’t always tell runners to “stop running” as a way to decrease stress. Running is only one form of stress. Running is biomechanical stress. But one of the most helpful s...

Any diagnosis ending in “-itis” means inflammation. If you have inflammation in the tendons, a short course of oral corticosteroids will help to shut off the inflammatory response and reduce the inflammation.  It took me nine years to get my spot at the Ironman World Championships. And unfortunately I got pneumonia right before the race. I had to take oral corticosteroids preceding and during Iron...

An over training injury is one of the worst possible things that can happen to a runner. You've been working toward a goal, hard, making sacrifices and then disaster strikes and you get injured.  Of course the best thing to do is to start healing and get back to training as fast as possible. There are lots of reasons I see runners procrastinate and unnecessarily put up their own roadblocks between...