Shin Splints Runners’ Biggest Hazard

You a beginning runner? Then beware of shin splints. Researchers in Denmark followed 933 beginning runners for an entire year to find out what injuries they experienced and how long it took them to get over them. The most common injury was shin splints and 27% of the 933 runners suffered from them. The average time to recover from shin splint injuries was 72 days.

The researchers defined a new runner as being one who had not run more than 10 kilometers in the year preceding. An injury was deemed to be anything that caused pain in the legs or in the lower back severe enough to curtail training for at least a week.

According to Scott Douglas, writing about the research for Running World, “of the 933 new runners, 254 met the definition of having a running injury during their first year.” For the majority of the runners, their injuries occurred during their first 125 miles of running. Ten percent experienced runner’s knee, 9% had a meniscus injury, 7% had Achilles tendinitis and 5% experienced either plantar fasciitis or an injury along the back of the leg.

Recovery times varied with plantar fasciitis taking the longest time to recover—an average of 159 days. Douglas reports that those with calf strains were able to resume normal running in 30 to 40 days. How well did the 254 injured runners recover? Two hundred twenty of the 254 injured runners, wrote Douglas, “recovered by the end of the one-year study while 34 were still injured.”