RESOURCES

Running injury rates have barely moved in three decades. Depending on the study, somewhere between 40 and 70% of recreational runners are injured badly enough in a given year to reduce their mileage or stop running altogether. Better shoes, better training science, better strength programming, better recovery tools, and a booming coaching industry have not meaningfully changed the number. That reality should be uncomfortable for anyone working with runners. It should also be

Most running injuries are not random. They are predictable. The tissue that eventually fails is rarely the original source of the problem. The plantar fascia, patellar tendon, iliotibial band, and posterior tibial tendon do not fail in isolation. They fail because something upstream in the kinetic chain was not managing load the way the body needed it to, and that tissue absorbed the deficit one stride at a time until it reached its limit. That is the reality of running injur