Now that the announcement is out and it’s official, it’s time to share with you my femoral stress fracture recovery plan.

This injury is going to determine how bad I want my goal.  The recovery time period is 6-7 weeks and during those weeks it my job to make sure I am doing everything possible to come back and still reach my goal!

Boston Marathon I am still coming for you! This little femoral stress fracture isn’t going to stop me. You can quote me on that!

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My recovery is going to come in several stages:

My Femoral Stress Fracture Recovery Plan

Stage 1

During these first 2 weeks while I still have pain in my leg I am doing NOTHING. This is going to be the hardest stage for me. No cross training, no weight training, just simply letting my body try to heal.

I do take small walks with my dog every day (2-3 a day) and try to incorporate some type of ab workout each day.

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My ab strength is not where it needs to be, and I know that this will drastically help to improve my running.

This stage will end somewhere around the week of October 7th.  If for any reason I still have pain in my femur at this point, I will continue to rest until it has subsided.


Stage 2

Weeks 3-6  of my femoral stress fracture recovery plan will be when I can first begin cross training. I am going to be focusing on:

1. Biking – I will mostly use the spin bike, and the focus of this will be to keep my heart rate and cardiovascular levels up.

2. Walking – The main goal of walking is to keep your legs used to impact.  Cross training on a bike is great, but when you start running again the force and impact from running can be really hard on your legs after a month and a half.  This will keeps my legs somewhat used to the impact, thought nothing can duplicate it entirely.

3. Water Running – My husband is a huge believer in water running and used it during his injury a few years ago. It seems quite boring to me, but I say if I can run on a treadmill for 2+ hours I can do some water running, right?

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4. Ab Work – I will continue to focus on strengthening my core. This is a focus throughout the recovery process.

5. Light weight training – Once I feel my leg in strong enough I also want to do some light weight training to keep my leg muscles strong. Weight training goes A LONG way and I have fallen off the wagon in making sure I was including it in my weekly routine.

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Stage 3

This will begin during week 6 when I should be at the end of the recovery process.

I will slowly incorporate slow, soft ground running in small increments at a time. This will allow me to test my leg and keep the impact low for the first couple weeks.

I also plan to increase my mileage slowly.  I want to note that the high mileage isn’t what I believe caused the stress fracture. If I had been doing all of my high mileage weeks at a slow easy pace I would have been fine. High mileage plus high intensity speed work is the combination that I think did me in.

I need to find a balance and this time when I get back into speed workouts I need to back down my mileage some during those weeks.

My goal when I first come back is to obtain my base and strength. I will run easy miles for a while until I feel I am ready to move on to speed work again.

 

On top of following my femoral stress fracture recovery plan I also will include:

1. Taking calcium 3 times a day.  I will break down all of the supplements I am taking during this time in a post coming up shortly, but one of my main focuses is to make sure I am getting adequate calcium.

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I even brought my bag of mid-day vitamins (I take Calcium Citrate mid-day) with me to my favorite coffee shop to work this morning.  There is no messing around with making sure I am getting adequate vitamin intake anymore.

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2. Focused on my diet. As my husband said to me, “each thing I eat should have some benefit to my body and bones.”  I will allow myself one “cheat day” where I give in more, but the other days will have a total focus on clean and nutritious eating.

There you have it. It is nothing crazy, but I do believe by listening to my body and focusing on doing these things consistently throughout my recovery I will come back a stronger and better runner!

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Have you ever had to come back from an injury? How long did it take you?

What do you have planned for your Saturday?

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