Staying Healthy, Sport's Great Challenge

At the introduction of Team USA Minnesota many years ago, coach Dennis Barker was asked about how one handled such talented athletes. He replied that his job was "not to ruin them." It was a tongue in cheek response that basically acknowledged that one of the keys to high level performance is to minimize injuries, a fact even Usain Bolt talked about recently, noting that one of his primary goals for each season is to avoid getting hurt.

Anyone who has coached top level talent will tell you that motivating the athletes to train harder is not an issue, it's getting them to train smart, to not overtrain, that produces the best results. A recent example of that is the new American recordholder in the 5K, Dathan Ritzenhein, who has been a top performer since high school, but has seldom been injury free. For US athletes staying healthy has always been a major challenge.

As the world of distance running has become more competitive, the workload for elite athletes has escalated. That, plus the US high school and collegiate system of racing, has combined to short circuit many careers. Oregon's Galen Rupp, for example, had a brilliant collegiate season, helping his team win the cross country, indoor, and almost the outdoor track championships. Rupp had to double and triple to make that happen, and the effort took its toll as Galen was not 100% going into the World Championships.

Much of the success of the African runners comes down to a sort of "natural selection," Darwinian process where the athletes who can tolerate the highest workload rise to the top of a large pool of genetically gifted athletes. If they don't over race and/or keep their motivation for success high, the Kenyan, Ethiopian, and other top Africans stay near the top of their profession for a long time, just look at Haile Gebrselassie, still setting records as he marches toward his 40th birthday.

In the US, we have access to more sophisticated and costly sports medicine programs that are increasingly utilized to rehab and keep healthy athletes who might otherwise quit their sport in frustration. Zero gravity tredmills, underwater tredmills, and the various technologies used to help heal injured tissue have kept athletes, such as Kara Goucher and Ritzenhein, able to train at a high level year round, instead of constantly struggling to deal with injury layoffs.

We've learned from the Africans that running on soft surfaces, instead of city streets or synthetic tracks, appears to help strengthen the body and reduce injury. Some have suggested that Bolt has also been helped by the fact that much of his training was done on grass tracks and soft surfaces as Jamaica does not have the many modern tracks as we have in the US.

Australian coach Percy Cerutty used to have his runners go barefoot on the beach and run up sand dunes to help strengthen the runners' feet and bodies. Oregon's Vin Lananna had his athletes run barefoot regularly because he thought it helped prevent injuries. The strategies for promoting injury free running are many, and there is no magic formula, as every runner is an experiment of one. Goucher's recent experience with the marathon being a cautionary tale of sorts.

Having had what she and her coach, Alberto Salazar, thought was great training going into Berlin, Goucher was confident that she was ready for a great performance. While the rest of her body was ready, Kara's stomach was not with the result being vomiting up her fuel and falling far short of what she believed she was capable of doing in the race. Now the search is on for training a testy stomach, as well as the rest of the body.

As the saying goes, "if it was easy, everybody would be doing it." Staying healthy sounds easy, but doing it while you push your body to its limit is the great challenge of modern sport.