myTF’s new Injury Log & Analysis tool has been live for just over a month now, and the feedback from physios, coaches and Premium users has been excellent. Let’s dive into how myTF can help you identify injury triggers from your training history, and then track your recovery.

Why runners get hurt

If you’ve been part of a run club you’ll know that the same two topics come up every time. The first is races: what’s the next race, who got a ballot place, who blew up last week… The second is injuries. It’s not that runners like to complain, just the unfortunate reality that half of all runners get injured every year (Kakouris et al. 2021). And the vast majority (70-80%) are not accidents, they’re overuse injuries. Lopes et al. (2012) went looking for which ones show up most, and the same names keep appearing: shin splints, Achilles tendinopathy, plantar fasciitis, runner’s knee, IT band syndrome. If you’ve been running for a few years, you’ve probably had at least one of them.

There are many reasons why runners get overuse injuries: not enough strength & conditioning, “wrong” shoes, heel strike, weak glutes, bad running form, etc… but by far the main cause of running injuries are what sports scientists call “training load errors”, and what the rest of us call “doing too much too soon”. Training load exceeds tissue capacity, typically because a rapid increase in mileage, pace, or suddenly switching from flat roads to hilly trails.

It’s easy to get this wrong: our cardiovascular system adapts fairly quickly; give it a few consistent weeks and it responds. Running feels a bit easier and you might feel like you could run more or faster. But connective tissues and bones are on a completely different clock. Tendons need 2-3 months of consistent training to strengthen; bone needs 3-6 months. So we feel stronger before we actually are, and the gap between the two is often where injuries happen.

Which leads to a slightly uncomfortable conclusion: most running injuries could be avoided with better training load management. But learning which training error(s) triggered an injury is harder than it sounds, because by the time the pain shows up, the cause might be two or three weeks in the past and long since forgotten.

Identifying potential injury triggers

myTrainingForecast’s Injury Log & Analysis is designed to help runners learn from their injuries. You log an injury or a niggle (old or new), and myTF lines it up against what you were actually doing in the weeks before it started.

Was that calf strain set up by the extra run you squeezed in a couple of days earlier? Was your Achilles ready for the long run progression your marathon plan asked for? Maybe your cadence has been quietly drifting down as your legs got more tired, increasing the load on the tibia, knees and hips?

myTF looks for the patterns that are plausible for the injured tissue, because they are not the same for every injury. A load spike matters differently to a muscle strain than it does to a bone that has been accumulating stress for a month. So the analysis considers ACWR training load spikes, cumulative overload, long run/ride progression, and the other things that changed around the same time, like pace, cadence, frequency, and run & ride elevation.

The aim isn’t to hand you a verdict, but to help you identify your training errors so you can learn from them and grow stronger. Did life get in the way and then you tried to make up the missed mileage too quickly? Was the weekend long run just too much on top of everything else that week? Was the half marathon plan too ambitious for where you started from?

By showing your historical training load alongside your injury onset and then recovery timeline, the “Trends” plots help you directly correlate how the various aspects of your training might have led to a niggle or injury. The “Triggers” tab identifies which training metrics were particularly elevated in the lead up to your injury. The triggers will adapt automatically to your injury, taking into account things like the tissue type, what body part was injured, and the sport you engaged in (run, ride, swim).

Tracking recovery

Understanding what caused an injury is only half of the problem. The other half is what happens next, and this is where most runners fly blind. So myTF helps you track recovery alongside your training. Every day you log how it feels, on a scale that runs from a niggle with no impact on training, through moderate pain where you are cutting volume, all the way to not being able to run at all. You can add private notes to help track more details about your progress and pain patterns.

Three things come out of the recovery log:

1. You start to see what actually provokes it. Maybe easy miles are completely fine and it’s the intervals or the hills that bring the pain back two days later. That’s very hard to spot from memory and fairly obvious when it is plotted next to your training timeline.
2. If you see a physio, either now or down the line if it isn’t going away, you can show them exactly what your training looked like before and after the injury appeared. Physios spend a good part of the first appointment trying to reconstruct that history with you from what you can remember, which may not be detailed enough. Having the real thing can make a genuine difference to how quickly they work out what is going on.
3. Some injuries improve so gradually that day to day it feels like nothing is happening at all, and that is when runners give up on rehab and go try something silly. A severity chart that is slowly heading in the right direction is surprisingly good for morale.

Individual variation is real, and some things genuinely are just bad luck. But most of us are not unlucky, we are just repeating a pattern we have never seen written down.

Back at the club, the injury conversation is always the same shape: what injury we’re back from, how long it took to recover. It very rarely gets as far as why we got hurt in the first place, but that’s the question worth answering, because it is the only one that changes what happens next time.

If you’ve tried myTF’s Injury Log & Analysis then drop a comment to let me know what you think or what features you’d like to see. And if not, how do you analyse the cause of your running injuries and track recovery?

myTF’s injury log and analysis is a Premium subscriber feature, but everyone can try it for free with a 7-day trial.

References

Kakouris N, Yener N, Fong DT. A systematic review of running-related musculoskeletal injuries in runners. Journal of sport and health science. 2021 Sep 1;10(5):513-22, DOI: 10.1016/j.jshs.2021.04.001

Lopes AD, Hespanhol Jr LC, Yeung SS, Costa LO. What are the main running-related musculoskeletal injuries? A systematic review. Sports medicine. 2012 Oct;42(10):891-905, DOI: 10.1007/BF03262301