If You (Don't) Tolerate This

Then your tibia will be next...

Jun 16, 2025

It was a year ago: Monday 17th June. My training diary reads “49 days off with left femur stress response”. It sounds dramatic. And it was, to be fair. That’s the most sedentary I’ve ever been. The present was something to be afraid of. The future did teach me to be alone...

Three days later the diary reads “Got bored of not running anymore. Used the [club] session to try and start the build”. Because boredom is a legitimate reason to start your rehab, of course.

That means that this week last year I was starting my slow build back to regular training following the most significant injury of my life. What I sort-of knew back then, but artfully ignored, was that this would be the start of a gloriously humbling rebuild. Not just of fitness, but of identity. Of my sense to belong in athletic environments and ultimately the return of Shane The [Balding] Athlete.

When You Think You’re Managing Load (But you’re really not)

I developed two bone stress responses. One in my thigh and one at the bottom of my pelvis. Stress responses are injuries that haven’t yet fully committed (like me to projects). They’re the soft-launch of a fracture. And I had the upper-leg equivalent of a passive-aggressive email gone too far; minimal pressing damage done, but under the surface the project is going to be made so awkward.

Typically, in runners, bone stress injuries occur when the repetitive loading continually exceeds the bone’s ability to repair and adapt. So why did I get injured? Because I did too much, right? Case closed. The film is over before it starts, like Home Alone would have if the parents actually checked their own kids.

Well, kind of, but that’s like saying someone got sunburned because the sun was out. We all know there’s more to it than that (UK readers, take note this week).

So when people asked, they had the same response “Ah, so you trained too hard”. I'd internally sigh, politely smile, try to explain the nuance, and often end-up just letting it go.

Because here’s the catch: I was running way less than I had in years prior. The actual training load was low-ish. Yet, my capacity to handle that load had dropped through the floor. I knew it had dropped, but never truly captured how low it had gone. It wasn’t overtraining, it was under-recovering. A tolerance issue. And if you don’t tolerate this… well, then your tibia will be next…

That’s the bit that gets missed. Injury is rarely about doing “too much” and training well is rarely about “training hard” - in an absolute sense. It’s about understanding what you can currently tolerate. And tolerance is fickle. It’s tied to sleep, stress, nutrition, mental load, and the holes in your head today. It’s dependent on current aerobic and anaerobic fitness, strength, speed, power, flexibility, and immune function. NOT whether Mercury’s in retrograde or you accidentally had decaf before your intervals.

Tolerance Isn’t Just a Rehab Word

In 2018, I did a course with Dr. Jake Harden on injury rehab. A room full of manual therapists, talking about load tolerance. It’s where I started to develop some of the coaching tools I use, because all I could think was, “this is training. It’s all the same”:

Find what the person can tolerate
Establish a tolerance timeline (recovery)
Work just around that
Build from there

Injury is basically a training error that hits the red line. The goal of rehab? Shift the red line back up. The goal of training? Same. Only we pretend we’re smarter because we wear a GPS watch and create catchy titles on Strava.

The difference is that in a good rehab mindset, we respect the idea of GRADUAL. With short-sighted training? We slowly drip-feed in fatigue and disguise it as discipline. We think more foam rolling or better glute activation will solve the recovery problem. (Spoiler: if you can stand up, your glutes are already firing. I’ve saved you hours of exercises there. You’re welcome.)

And we can flip the script for injury. Keep training under the guide of your newly identified tolerance to train.

Example: if you’ve broken your tibia from a football tackle, and can tolerate nothing, then sure, that’s your level and you’re building up from nothing. But, if you’ve sprained your ankle, can’t tolerate the impact of controlling a ball, slowly work on your agility (or play air-football…) It’s going to keep you moving, keep you mentally engaged, all while building the level of sport-specific actions that your ankle can tolerate.

Finding the Edge Without Falling Off It

I talk with my clients athletes about finding the edge. I define it as the point before load meets limit. Not the dramatic collapse. Because what I’ve learnt through my career and life involved in athletics, is that moment we feel we’re at the limit in our life, we’re usually over the edge already.

Every workout has its own edge. It's not a fixed thing or feeling. It changes with fatigue, life stress, caffeine intake, how recently you argued with your network provider - all of it. And, like tolerance, is depending on those components of fitness.

The goal is not to avoid the edge forever. It's to know where it is and how close to get. Don’t stand too close on a windy day! (Not just a metaphor for readers local to Lincolnshire!)

For me, I’ve built the following rules. Some formal, some lived experience:

If interruptions on easy days feel disjointed, it’s absolutely not “easy.”
If the tempo feels forced, it’s too fast or too far.
Lower leg aching is my time limit for high intensity reps (this is VERY specific to me!)
If I’m lethargic at midday, I haven’t slept well
Keep load ratios tight. Wild fluctuations push me over the edge.

These rules aren’t magic. They’re boundaries developed from the best training sensor we all own - our bodies. With time, these rules will adapt and the boundaries will expand.

The Comeback Kid (Now with Bedtime White-noise)

Injury allowed me to live through the principles I’m preaching. It allowed me to experience the very things I try to help people manage. It allowed me to ask questions of myself, of my values, and of my philosophy. And one thing is for sure, it tested the robustness of my own theories and understanding of adaptation derived from evolving research and smarter coaching practices. Luckily, I have been to experience a change in the rules and boundaries that I train and recover by.

And now, a year on from my first run/walk around the cricket pitch, with a failed build attempt, losing my identity as an athlete, I’ve just completed my 6th week of consistent training between 6:30 and 7:00 hours of running. I’ve lined up for a road race. I have a track race this week, and I’m looking to compete at some of the competitions I did when developing my identity as an athlete. I am regaining some of my old self (like I wrote for my New Years post).

Time has gone fast, and adaptation has gone slow, but at the very rate in which it probably needed to. And somewhere in the background… An old Shane plays with newspaper cuttings of his glory days (Except now they’re screenshots from Strava Segments.